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.
A recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material could be explained by a series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents.” The discovery from physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and Georgia Tech may one day help engineers develop new types of devices, such as quantum sensors, or the quantum equivalent of computer memory storage devices. The Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics who co-authored the study are Itamar Kimchi, assistant professor, and Sami Hakani, graduate student.
Molecular Beehive: Physicists Probe “Astonishing” Morphing Properties of Honeycomb-Like Quantum Material 2022-10-19T00:00:00-04:00October is National Disabilities Employment Awareness Month, and The Able Channel is celebrating by raising awareness about the importance of work for those living and working with disability. Hosted by Paralympic Gold Medal-winning swimmer Mallory Weggeman, "Together We Are Able" showcases the stories of 10 Americans who have redefined perceptions of what the word able is all about. College of Sciences Advisory Board member Paul S. Goggin (Physics 1991, M.S. Atmospheric Sciences 1994) is the founder and chief operating officer of The Able Channel. "Together We Are Able" will air on NBC, CBS, Fox, and other channels, and on The Able Channel's streaming service.
Able Channel Announces One Hour Television Special "Together We Are Able" 2022-10-04T00:00:00-04:00Astronauts could return to the moon in a few years, and if they do, they might be wearing spacesuits designed with the help of Thom Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Physics. Orlando, who is also a co-founder of Georgia Tech's Center for Space Technology and Research, spoke with GPB's Peter Biello about the science of spacesuit design.
Georgia Tech professor helps design NASA’s latest generation spacesuits 2022-09-27T00:00:00-04:00In a physics lab in Amsterdam, there’s a wheel that can spontaneously roll uphill by wiggling. This “odd wheel” looks simple: just six small motors linked together by plastic arms and rubber bands to form a ring about 6 inches in diameter. When the motors are powered on, it starts writhing, executing complicated squashing and stretching motions and occasionally flinging itself into the air, all the while slowly making its way up a bumpy foam ramp. The odd wheel’s unorthodox mode of travel exemplifies a recent trend: Physicists are finding ways to get useful collective behavior to spontaneously emerge in robots assembled from simple parts that obey simple rules. Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics (who did not work on the odd wheel study), uses the term "robophysics" to describe this latest trend in robotics.
A Wheel Made of ‘Odd Matter’ Spontaneously Rolls Uphill 2022-09-25T00:00:00-04:00Electrical signals tell the heart to contract, but when the signals form spiral waves, they can lead to dangerous cardiac events like tachycardia and fibrillation. Researchers at Georgia Tech and clinicians at Emory University School of Medicine are bringing a new understanding to these complicated conditions with the first high-resolution visualizations of stable spiral waves in human ventricles. The Georgia Tech School of Physics researchers are Flavio Fenton, professor, and IIija Uzelac, research scientist.
Researchers map rotating spiral waves in live human hearts 2022-09-07T00:00:00-04:00NASA is preparing to enter a new space age from Florida's space coast, and a scientist in Georgia is helping newly tapped Artemis astronauts step onto the moon with next-generation suits. Thom Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Physics, is a co-founder of the Center for Space Technology and Research. Orlando has been working with NASA to design the space suits that future astronauts will wear as they walk on the lunar surface.
How this Georgia Tech professor is fashioning the next generation of NASA space suits 2022-09-03T00:00:00-04:00After years of planning and two Covid-induced delays, the TRACER (TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment) field campaign began last fall in the Houston, Texas, region, collecting data on clouds, aerosols, precipitation, meteorology, and radiation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A four-month intensive operational period began June 1, bringing many more instruments and detailed measurements to the campaign. This allowed a group of undergraduate and high school interns at Brookhaven National Laboratory to gain firsthand experience analyzing real atmospheric data and contribute to the science coming from TRACER. One of those undergraduate interns is Emily Melvin of the School of Physics, who blogs that she was "allowed to practice my forecasting skills and explore some of the resources available to meteorologists."
TRACER Talk: Student Interns Contribute to Early Research Efforts 2022-08-31T00:00:00-04:00Turbulence plays a key role in our daily lives, making for bumpy plane rides, affecting weather and climate, limiting the fuel efficiency of the cars we drive, and impacting clean energy technologies. Yet, scientists and engineers have puzzled at ways to predict and alter turbulent fluid flows, and it has long remained one of the most challenging problems in science and engineering. Now, physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated — numerically and experimentally — that turbulence can be understood and quantified with the help of a relatively small set of special solutions to the governing equations of fluid dynamics that can be precomputed for a particular geometry, once and for all. The research by Roman Grigoriev and Michael Schatz, professors in the School of Physics, was also covered in ScienceDaily.
Physicists uncover new dynamical framework for turbulence 2022-08-29T00:00:00-04:00Scientists at Georgia Tech and Clark University have developed robotic lizards in a collaboration combining robotics, math, biology, and artificial intelligence. The robots helped solve an evolutionary puzzle and could be the first step towards a new generation of wiggling robots. The team used artificial intelligence to study the movement of various lizard species. “We were interested in why and how these intermediate lizards use their bodies and limbs to move around in different terrestrial environments,” says one of the study’s authors, Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. “This is a fundamental question in locomotion biology and can inspire more capable wiggling robots.” Other School of Physics scientists involved in the research include Ph.D. students Baxi Chong and Tianyu Wang, and Eva Erickson (B.S. PHYS '22).
Meet the Lizard Robot That Could Save Your Life 2022-08-01T00:00:00-04:00Elisabetta Matsumoto, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, is featured in a documentary directed by Shruti Mandhani, a research fellow for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom, and a Ph.D. student at Sheffield Hallam University. The documentary focuses on imposter syndrome, a psychological condition in which individuals doubt their skills and abilities, and fear being discovered as frauds. Mandhani interviewed other women in STEM (science, technology, mathematics, and engineering) disciplines for the documentary, which is shortlisted for the Bristol Science Film Festival in August.
Meeting my Role Models: An Insight into Imposter Syndrome 2022-07-19T00:00:00-04:00Small robots that have two flapping arms and can’t move around on their own can spontaneously link up and glide together instead. This self-organization may be related to how complex structures arise from simple building blocks in nature. Daniel Goldman, professor in the School of Physics, and his colleagues used small robots called smarticles — short for “smart active particles” — to observe self-organization in the lab.
Alan Gilbert (MS Phys 93) was recently named co-chairman of The Foundry Inc., a private non-profit learning-based high school in Fayetteville, Ga. The news is highlighted in the Class Notes listings of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine's Ramblin' Roll section.
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine's Class Notes 2022-04-14T00:00:00-04:00- ‹ 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
