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.
Here is how the Los Angeles Times broke the news of the first-ever detection of a neutron star collision and how the celestial event was confirmed by scientists and astronomers around the world. Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, is quoted in the article.
partner institutions 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
"This is the first time we had a 3D IMAX view of an astronomical event," says Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and deputy spokeperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. She's referring to more than 70 observatories around the world that helped confirm the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and light caused by the merger of two neutron stars. The resulting explosion and lightshow those astronomers witnessed from the merger is called a kilonova, and it's the source of Earth's heavy elements like gold, silver, and platinum.
sustainability award 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00Welcome to the era of multi-messenger astrophysics – a single event in the cosmos that gives off both gravitational and electromagnetic waves. That's what the Aug. 17, 2017, detection by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration of two neutron stars merging means for the scientific community, which is celebrating yet another discovery that confirms a century-old theory from Albert Einstein. Once again, School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, LIGO's deputy spokesperson, is proving to be very quotable. "We can now fill in a few more tiles in the jigsaw puzzle that is the story of our universe," Cadonati tells CNN.
McMillan Street 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00The first-ever detection of gravitational waves and light from the collision of two neutron stars isn't just setting the scientific community ablaze. It also ushers in a new "multi-messenger" astronomy, with scientists arround the world gathering and studying those waves, light, and subatomic particles at the same time. So says Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and the deputy spokesperson for the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration, and she explains the significance of this new era. Cadonati is also a member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
work family interactions 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00The Aug.17, 2017, detection of gravitational waves and light from the merger of two neutron stars set off a race against time around the globe. Astronomers scrambled to confirm data that could be seen by telescopes and measured by gamma-ray, x-ray and radio wave detection equipment before they all faded away. Laura Cadonati, associate professor in the School of Physics and LIGO Scientific Collaboration deputy spokesperson, explains how these gravitational waves lasted longer than those from four previous incidents caused by black hole collisions. Cadonati is a member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
advice for students 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
"This year's prize is about a discovery that shook the world." That's how an official with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was awarded to the three founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) for the detection of gravitational waves. Georgia Tech has a front-row seat for that achievement, thanks to its membership in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a global team of scientists that helps to confirm gravitational-wave data. Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and LIGO deputy spokesperson, is quoted in this article, as she is in a separate story for the Verge. Another LIGO member and School of Physics researcher, Karan Jani, reacts to the Nobel Prize in this Forbes article.
work family interactions 2017-10-03T00:00:00-04:00There are black holes, and then there are supermassive black holes that could have played a role in the formation of the universe. How they got so big remains a mystery, but new theories and research may be closing in on answers. A study from earlier this year supports one of these theories: that radiation from nearby galaxies created the galactic monsters. The study was co-authored by John Wise, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics. Wise's work is dthe subject of this Scientific American report.
work family interactions 2017-09-29T00:00:00-04:00School of Physics Assistant Professor Simon Sponberg has the coveted cover story in the September issue of Physics Today. Sponberg, principal investigator in the Agile Systems Lab, gives a state-of-the-science report on animal locomotion; how different physiological systems within a moth, for example, interact within the insect to enable movement, and how that moth interacts with its environment. Data arising from new studies of such neuromechanics have applications for robotics. Sponberg is also an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and an adjunct assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
campus drone 2017-09-01T00:00:00-04:00"A pretty cool paper." That's how one of the hosts of the This Week in Microbiology podcast (ep. 159) describes the recent study by School of Biological Sciences professor Joshua Weitz and postdoctoral scientist Chung Yin (Joey) Leung. The Tech researchers discovered that immune cells in an animal host act synergistically with bacteria-killing viruses – phages – to wipe out fatal respiratory infections in lab mice. TWiM is the official podcast of the American Society for Microbiology. Both Weitz and Leung are also affiliated with the School of Physics, and Weitz is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences.
TRACER 2017-08-31T00:00:00-04:00The special memories of Eclipse 2017 @ Georgia Tech linger. This video from Tech Square ATL on the Aug. 21 celestial event was produced by Sandbox ATL in partnership with the University Financing Foundation, the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), and the Scheller College of Business. It highlights the reactions from those who started that day at the cluster of tech startups on the other side of the Downtown Connector on 5th Street before they made their way to the Kessler Campanile. College of Sciences Dean Paul Goldbart is interviewed. Also, WREK 91.1, Tech's student-run radio station, aired a special "97 Percent Eclipse of the Heart" version of its Lost in the Stacks program. You'll hear Georgia Tech Observatory Director James Sowell interviewed between eclipse-themed songs by Television, Pink Floyd, the Police, and Love and Rockets. Sowell is also a senior academic professional in the School of Physics.
salary study 2017-08-30T00:00:00-04:00As if the swamped residents of the Texas Gulf Coast don't have enough reasons to curse Hurricane Harvey, here's one more: clumps of stinging fire ants bobbing in the floodwaters. The New York Times story and this one in the Washington Post cite a 2011 study by School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor David Hu that explained the fire ant's raft-building superpower. Hu is also an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
Extension of Self 2017-08-30T00:00:00-04:00Those scenes of floating fire ant "rafts" plaguing flooding victims of Hurricane Harvey in Houston? David Hu, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, first examined that nightmare scenario in 2011. That was when Hu and his research team published a study on how ants lock legs to form the rafts. You also may recall his research from earlier this summer on how the ants don't just spread out when threatened; they can also "perpetually rebuild" towers made of their own bodies. Hu is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
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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
