School of Physics

 

 

 

Latest News

Dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair Susan Lozier has been reappointed to a five-year term in the College of Sciences. 

Itamar Kimchi and Sourabh Saha each received $875,000 for their pioneering work in quantum materials and fusion energy.

College of Sciences faculty are among the recipients of the third round of Undergraduate Sustainability Education Innovation Grants awarded by the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Yellow Jacket alumni working at Coca-Cola dispensed real-world advice and insights to College of Sciences students during a recent Career Trek to the headquarters of the global beverage giant.

Events

Oct 10

Observatory Public Night

On the grounds between the Howey and Mason Buildings, several telescopes are typically set up for viewing, and visitors are invited to bring their own telescope, as well.

Oct 17

C-PIES Community Event

Join the Center for Promoting Inclusion and Equity in the Sciences to celebrate the new academic year!

Oct 18

Beyond 1905: Einstein's Light, Love, and Lies

Join us for this fascinating public lecture as we journey into the heart of relativity.

Oct 23

CMP/AMO Seminar: Topology and Correlations in Thin-Layered TaIrTe₄

CMP/AMO Seminar: Topology and Correlations in Thin-Layered TaIrTe₄

Oct 28

School of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Peter Armitage

Peter Armitage (John Hopkins University)

Oct 30

Chiral Andreev edge states in graphene

Chiral Andreev edge states in graphene

Oct 30

College of Sciences Student and Alumni Leadership Dinner

Join us for a memorable evening of growth and camaraderie.

 

Experts in the News

Despite the fact that Antarctica is extraordinarily difficult to get to, astronomers love it and have chosen it as the location for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. What could possibly make such a remote location so desirable for space science that it’s worth all that trouble? 

In this article, scientists including Georgia Tech's Brandon Pries from the School of Physics explain why the South Pole is such a hotspot for astronomers. The answer? At the South Pole, you can best view neutrons and neutrinos in space. 

Pries compares the benefits of the South Pole to the North Pole. “The North Pole is more difficult because ice coverage there fluctuates,” explains Pries. “There is a foundation of bedrock underneath Antarctica that serves as a solid base for the IceCube instruments.” This bedrock is also why Antarctica is home to the South Pole Telescope, a radio observatory that helped take the first ever photo of a black hole.

Popular Science 2024-09-05T00:00:00-04:00

Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics including fifth-year PhD student Mengqi Huang and Assistant Professor Chunhui Rita Du are among the authors of a paper recently published in Nature Physics. Researchers from six universities and Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that strong quantum fluctuations can stabilize an unconventional magnetic phase after destroying a more conventional one.

Nature Physics 2024-08-26T00:00:00-04:00

Scientists have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy.

The neutrinos were detected over a span of a decade at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole, using more than 5,000 sensors covering an area the size of a small mountain.

School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and provides a brief commentary on this new research:

"This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," says Taboada.

Reuters 2024-07-29T00:00:00-04:00

Groundbreaking research is shedding new light on how biofilms grow — using physics and mathematical models. Biofilms grow everywhere — from plaque on teeth, to medical devices, to the open ocean. But until now, it’s been difficult to study just what controls their growth. In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the Yunker Lab in the School of Physics, including Lead Researcher Aawaz Pokhrel and Associate Professor Peter Yunker, leveraged physics to show that a biofilm’s geometry is the single most important factor in determining growth rate — more important than even the rate at which cells can reproduce. Since some research shows that 80% of infections in human bodies are caused by the bacteria in biofilms, understanding how colonies grow has important human health implications, potentially to help reduce their impact in medical settings or industrial processes. (This also appeared in Phys.org and Dental Review News.)

Nature Physics 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00

Every few seconds, somewhere in the observable Universe, a massive star collapses and unleashes a supernova explosion. Physicists say Japan’s Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) observatory might now be collecting a steady trickle of neutrinos from those cataclysms — amounting to a few detections a year.

In an article published in Nature, School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada provides a brief commentary on this new research: "The data from Super-K are still too weak to claim a discovery, but the prospect of detecting the diffuse neutrinos is extremely exciting”, says Tabaoda, who is also the spokesperson for the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole. “Neutrinos would provide an independent measurement on the history of star formation in the Universe.”

Nature 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00

Recent demonstrations of moiré magnetism, featuring exotic phases with noncollinear spin order in the twisted van der Waals (vdW) magnet chromium triiodide CrI3, have highlighted the potential of twist engineering of magnetic (vdW) materials. In this paper, researchers, including School of Physics assistant professors Hailong Wang and Chunhui Du, reported the observation of two distinct magnetic phase transitions with separate critical temperatures within a moiré supercell of small-angle twisted double trilayer CrI3.

Nature Communications 2024-07-08T00:00:00-04:00