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.
More and more self-driving and internet-connected vehicles are making its way to the market, which is endlessly exciting to autophiles. However, new research demonstrates how the rise of connected cars could make entire cities vulnerable to hackers. In a new study published in the journal Physical Review E, physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Peter Yunker, and from Multiscale Systems, Inc. used physics to analyze the future of automative cybersecurity. The team focused on potential hacks on vehicles, including potential mass destruction. The work received coverage also from Fox News, Daily Mail, WSB Radio, New York Post, Electronics Weekly, Smart Cities Dive, Consumer Affairs, and Secure World.
Shruti Mandhani n 2019-07-30T00:00:00-04:00Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of mathematical physics known as chaos, died on June 30 in Manhattan. He was 74. ... During a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell, Dr. Feigenbaum was already allowing his focus to wander. “He was not very happy with the physics he was doing at that time,” said Predrag Cvitanovic, a theoretical physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics, who was a graduate student at Cornell at the time. “The main thing he did is he solved the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning,” Dr. Cvitanovic said. “It was just clear that he was very smart. He didn’t produce anything I was aware of.”
Extension of Self 2019-07-18T00:00:00-04:00Fire ants in Louisiana were caught on camera saving themselves from Tropical Storm Barry's floodwaters by banding together to form a raft. Jonathan Petralama, a weather reporter for Accuweather.com, was monitoring floodwaters from an overtopped levee in Plaquemines Parish when he captured video of "fire ant balls" floating in the water. ... Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology said in a 2013 study that fire ants use their jaws, small claws and adhesive pads on their legs to form into floating structures. These researchers said the "ant rafts" are strong enough to withstand waves and are able to break apart and re-link in different formations. Not mentioned in the article is that the Georgia Tech researchers are led by David Hu, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Mechanical Engineering, with appointments in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physics.
Hungtang Ko 2019-07-15T00:00:00-04:00In a finding that’s great news for fans of Luke Skywalker’s fictional home planet Tatooine, scientists say planets in multiple-star systems may be habitable – though in keeping with Tatooine’s hardscrabble image, it may be an uphill battle. Astronomers have long known that multiple-star systems are common. “Most stars are members of binaries [other than the coolest dwarf stars],” Manfred Cuntz, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Arlington. And, as astronomers are learning, many of these binary-star systems have planets – some circling a single star, and some circling both at once. Life on these planets could have a hard go of it, however. In binary star systems, this effect can be radically stronger, says Billy Quarles, a research scientist in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, especially if the planet’s orbit doesn’t lie in the same plane as its stars’ orbits around each other. “Seasons around these binaries may be a lot more variable than on Earth,” he says. “There are times when there are no seasons, and others when seasons [are larger], on a time scale of a few tens of thousands of years.”
undergraduate leadership 2019-06-26T00:00:00-04:00A graduate of Georgia Tech has been named its next president. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the Georgia Board of Regents voted Thursday to hire Ángel Cabrera to lead the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees. Cabrera is to start in his new post by Sept. 15. Cabrera had been president of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, since 2012. He and his wife met while both were enrolled at Georgia Tech School of Psychology. Their son recently graduated from the school. This was also covered by the Washington Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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 2019-03-06T00:00:00-05:00- ‹ previous
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Events
Soft Matter Seminar| Prof. Justin Burton | Emory UN | Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin
Soft Matter Seminar| Prof. Justin Burton | Emory UN | Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin
School of Physics Fall Colloquium Series- Dr. Zhenghan Wang(UCSB)
Dr. Zhenghan Wang(UCSB) Topological fault-tolerance in quantum computing
Special CRA SEMINAR| Prof. Paz Beniamini | The Open UN of Israel | Host: Prof. David Ballantyne
Special CRA SEMINAR| Prof. Paz Beniamini | The Open UN of Israel | Host: Prof. David Ballantyne
State of the School Address- Dr. Feryal Ozel
Dr. Feryal Ozel- GA Tech School of Physics Chair
CRA SEMINAR | Vikram Manikantan | UN of Arizona | Host: Dr. Matthew Liska
CRA SEMINAR | Vikram Manikantan | UN of Arizona | Host: Dr. Matthew Liska
Georgia Tech Space Week
A campus-wide celebration of innovation in the space domain, bringing together academia, industry, and government.
Experts in the News
Researchers in the School of Physics, working with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, have found that standard methods for identifying chirality in topological phases fail when applied to mixed quantum states. The study reveals that established diagnostics, including bulk-boundary correspondence and the modular commutator, are unreliable in these complex systems. Consequently, the research presents two new measures, based on relative entropy, to accurately diagnose chirality and determine the chiral central charge in decohered topological phases, indicating a need for a new set of tools when investigating mixed-state topology.
Quantum Zeitgeist 2026-07-16T00:00:00-04:00Bacteria have no neurons or memories in the human sense. Yet in a new study, researchers at Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon University — including School of Physics Associate Professor Shiladitya Banerjee and Postdoctoral Fellow Josiah Kratz — found that individual E. coli cells carried traces of past hardship into the future. When nutrients repeatedly rose and fell, the cells changed how quickly they grew, suggesting that even simple microbes can use experience to prepare for what may come next.
ZME Science 2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech researchers have recreated the effects of solar wind on lunar minerals in a laboratory experiment, providing new evidence that the constant stream of charged particles from the sun plays a major role in shaping the moon’s surface.
The team exposed ilmenite, a mineral commonly found on both Earth and the moon, to a synthetic version of solar wind. The experiment produced nanophase iron, tiny metallic particles that are widely observed in lunar soil and are considered a key signature of space weathering.
Interesting Engineering 2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00A new study led by researchers, including School of Physics graduate student Julia Esposito and Associate Professor Gongjie Li, used 1,500 virtual planetary systems to examine how planet-planet scattering may have influenced the formation of Jupiter-sized planets.
American Astronomical Society NOVA 2026-05-22T00:00:00-04:00Researchers have long known that when two galaxies approach each other and merge, the supermassive black holes at their centers form a pair and are eventually expected to merge as well. It is precisely these mergers that are considered one of the sources of the gravitational-wave background — a faint “hum” of spacetime detected in recent years. However, the role played by the geometry of the collision in this process has remained an open question.
Graduate student Sena Ghobadi of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, along with her colleagues, has developed three-dimensional dynamic models of such collisions.
A similar story appeared in Sky & Telescope.
Universe Magazine 2026-04-28T00:00:00-04:00Research 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 2026-02-27T00:00:00-05:00
