To request a media interview, please reach out to School of Physics experts using our faculty directory, or contact Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences communications director. A list of faculty experts and research areas across the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech is also available to journalists upon request.
The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (USG) today announced Dr. Ángel Cabrera as finalist for the Georgia Tech presidency. Cabrera is currently president of George Mason University, a top-tier research institution and the largest public university in Virginia. Cabrera is an alumnus of the School of Psychology.
Student Leadership Endowment Fund 2019-06-06T00:00:00-04:00The explosions that blew apart the universe’s first stars are shrouded in mystery. These energetic blasts are inherently difficult to recreate in computer simulations, even using modern computing power. “It’s one of the hardest physics problems out there,” says Alexander Ji, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. Furthermore, he notes that researchers still lack an answer to a simple question: What types of stars do—and do not—explode? John Wise, a computational astrophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is currently studying how metals propagated from the first generation of stars to the second, says this study has already inspired him to modify his methodology for that project. “Now we have some motivation to look at aspherical supernovae,” he says. Researchers do not yet know whether the likely aspherical explosion of the supernova preceding HE 1327-2326 was a rarity or a common occurrence. They still wonder whether the bulk of supernova explosions from the first generation were spherical or aspherical. So, though it appears they have approached a solution to one mystery about the first stars, numerous others abound.
work family interactions 2019-05-31T00:00:00-04:00"Knitting is coding," says Elisabetta Matsumoto, assistant professor in the School of Physics. She made this argument during a Boston knitting session she co-hosted in March as part of her five-year, National Science Foundation-funded effort to study the mathematics and physics behind knitting. The New York Times was there for a session that was half relaxing hobby, half scientific exploration of the patterns, topology, and geometry involved in knitting (which has been around since the 11th century) and how Matsumoto's research could lead to "programmable" fabrics.
Extension of Self 2019-05-17T00:00:00-04:00If you’ve ever been lucky enough to receive a handmade sweater as a gift...you may never have thought of your crafty relative as the engineering type. Knitters actually spend a huge amount of time planning out the structure of their creations. After all, it isn’t easy to create a three-dimensional, highly structured object from a one-dimensional strand of yarn. Textile engineers contend with dozens of competing factors like strength, elasticity, texture, and cost. While these have traditionally been relegated to the fashion industry, Dr. Elisabetta Matsumoto’s lab at Georgia Tech sees them as a rich, hitherto unexplored field of physics.
Pardyot Yadav 2019-04-24T00:00:00-04:00Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have managed to build a cascading silicon peashooter -- a smaller, more precise atomic beam collimator. The technology could be used to produce exotic quantum phenomena for scientists to study or to improve devices like atomic clocks or accelerometers, a smartphone component. "A typical device you might make out of this is a next-generation gyroscope for a precision navigation system that is independent of GPS and can be used when you're out of satellite range in a remote region or traveling in space," Chandra Raman, an associate professor of physics at Georgia Tech, said in a news release.
fruit cup 2019-04-23T00:00:00-04:00Rovers tend to be designed like little cars, equipped with wheels that spin on fixed axles. But that can leave the vehicles vulnerable to getting stuck, as Spirit infamously did on Mars. That's why School of Physics Daniel Goldman's team is finding new ways for rovers to move.
GradIO 2019-03-16T00:00:00-04:00Dating back more than 3,000 years, knitting is an ancient form of manufacturing, but Elisabetta Matsumoto of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta believes that understanding how stitch types govern shape and stretchiness will be invaluable for designing new "tunable" materials. For instance, tissuelike flexible material could be manufactured to replace biological tissues, such as torn ligaments, with stretchiness and sizing personalized to fit each individual. Matsumoto is an assistant professor in the School of Physics.
Katherine Roberts 2019-03-06T00:00:00-05:00Struck by climbing suicide rates, third-year School of Biological Sciences major Collin Spencer organized the first Intercollegiate Mental Health Conference, which kicked off on Feb. 15, 2019. "Mental health is one of the most pressing issues for adolescents in the country right now," Spencer says.
early admit 2 2019-02-20T00:00:00-05:00That's what scientists found while studying the dinnertime of black soldier fly larvae, or maggots. When vast quantities of these larvae feed together, their surging movement around their food creates a living fountain of writhing bodies. That may sound revolting, but the strategy makes maggots uniquely efficient at devouring meals en masse, scientists reported in a new study. [Ear Maggots and Brain Amoeba: 5 Creepy Flesh-Eating Critters] Larvae of the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) typically hatch, live and eat together in the hundreds and thousands, and each voracious grub can consume up to twice its body mass in a day, lead study author Olga Shishkov, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, told Live Science. Shishkov works with mechanical engineering professor David Hu, who holds concurrent appointments in the Schools of Biological Sciences and of Physics. Story was also covered by Fox News and Science Friday
"Research can always wait. Life is irreplaceable," writes John Wise in his feature for Astronomy behind the scenes of his most recent paper. He's explaining his decision to put his work on hold during his wife's cancer treatment (quoted here). Wise initially set out to answer this question: How do supermassive black holes form in the first place? The feature offers a rare look at the intersection between a researcher's work and his perosnal life. In January, we covered his work on black holes here.
yanni 2019-01-24T00:00:00-05:00
"Even a horse's tail shouts out secrets," says David Hu, who holds joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Mechanical Engineering. For the past few months, Hu had been plagued by a simple question: What's the purpose of a horse's tail? Using biology and engineering, Hu and his team found the answer. Hu is also an adjunct professor in the School of Physics.
work family interactions 2018-10-16T00:00:00-04:00Once more, this ultrapopular story about School of Physics' Dan Goldman's lazy-ant research has been picked up. Maybe we're just really relieved to find out that laziness has some benefits?
campus drone 2018-10-01T00:00:00-04:00- ‹ previous
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Events
FulminoSat: Using Lightning to Measure the Ionosphere with a Georgia Tech CubeSat Constellation
Learn how Georgia Tech researchers are leveraging lightning and CubeSat technology to study space weather and its impacts on critical space‑enabled systems.
School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series- Dr. Konrad Lehnert
Dr. Konrad Lehnert(Yale) Building quantum technology from quantum sound
College of Sciences Town Hall
College of Sciences students, faculty, and staff are invited to our end-of-school year town hall.
Experts in the News
Research led by Georgia Tech physicist Itamar Kolvin has found that the presence of small imperfections or heterogeneities in materials can have a dual effect on their strength and resilience. While heterogeneities were historically believed to make materials stronger by creating an obstacle course for cracks, the new study shows that in some complex materials, heterogeneities can actually accelerate crack propagation and weaken the overall structure. The findings have implications for how engineers design and reinforce materials to optimize their toughness.
Atlanta Today 2026-02-27T00:00:00-05:00Assistant Professor Zhu-Xi Luo and Ph.D. student Yi-Lin Tsao from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics have demonstrated a novel mechanism for stabilising physical phases vulnerable to topological defects. Their work addresses a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics: the destabilisation of phases like superfluids by thermally-induced defects such as anyons and vortices.
Quantum Zeitgeist 2026-02-25T00:00:00-05:00In an article published in Physics Magazine, School of Physics Ph.D. student Jingcheng Zhou and Assistant Professor Chunhui (Rita) Du review efforts to optimize diamond-based quantum sensing. According to Zhou and Du, the approach used in two recent studies broadens the potential applications of nitrogen-vacancy center sensors for probing quantum phenomena, enabling measurements of nonlocal properties (such as spatial and temporal correlations) that are relevant to condensed-matter physics and materials science.
Physics Magazine 2025-07-14T00:00:00-04:00Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and India's National Center for Biological Sciences have found that yeast clusters, when grown beyond a certain size, spontaneously generate fluid flows powerful enough to ferry nutrients deep into their interior.
In the study, "Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast," published in Science Advances, the research team — which included Georgia Tech Ph.D. scholar Emma Bingham, Research Scientist G. Ozan Bozdag, Associate Professor William C. Ratcliff, and Associate Professor Peter Yunker — used experimental evolution to determine whether non-genetic physical processes can enable nutrient transport in multicellular yeast lacking evolved transport adaptations.
A similar story also appeared at The Hindu.
Phys.org 2025-06-24T00:00:00-04:00Other planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have seasonal cycles — and they can look wildly different from the ones we experience on Earth, experts told Live Science.
To understand how other planets have seasons, we can look at what drives seasonal changes on our planet. "The Earth has its four seasons because of the spin axis tilt," Gongjie Li, associate professor in the School of Physics, told Live Science. This means that our planet rotates at a slight angle of around 23.5 degrees.
"On Earth, we're very lucky, this spin axis is quite stable," Li said. Due to this, we've had relatively stable seasonal cycles that have persisted for millennia, although the broader climate sometimes shifts as the entire orbit of Earth drifts further or closer from the sun.
Such stability has likely helped life as we know it develop here, Li said. Scientists like her are now studying planetary conditions and seasonal changes on exoplanets to see whether life could exist in faroff worlds. For now, it seems as though the mild seasonal changes and stable spin tilts on Earth are unique.
Live Science 2025-05-05T00:00:00-04:00Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm
Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.
The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.
Quanta Magazine 2025-04-21T00:00:00-04:00
