Cornell University Physics

05/22/2026

For her volunteer outreach encouraging local children to learn about physics and reading, Abra Geiger ’26 has won the 2026 University Relations Campus-Community Leadership Award.

05/08/2026

Michael Niemack, professor of physics and astronomy (A&S) presented on Prime-Cam, the massive FYST instrument whose design he led. “I believe it to be the largest submillimeter instrument that’s ever been built, both in physical size and most importantly in the number of detectors,” he said, thousands of which can fit on a single silicon wafer.

Cornell University's Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) was formally inaugurated on April 9 in Chile's Atacama Desert, marking a new era in submillimeter astronomy. The CCAT Observatory partnership telescope, led by Cornell, will map galaxy formation, cosmic microwave background radiation, an...

05/04/2026

Researchers created a computational model that shows the effect of insects’ morphology on stabilizing their flight, which could provide a blueprint for designing flapping-wing robots.

05/01/2026

The work in the Ralph Group consists of making nanometer-size devices using equipment at the Cornell NanoScale Science Technology Facility (CNF) and studying their properties.

Physicist Dan Ralph, Ph.D. ’93, and materials scientist Darrell Schlom are Cornell’s 2026 electees to the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced April 28.

04/27/2026

Big congratulations are in order! 🎉

This year marked Cornell's very first participation in the RIT Physics Olympiad — and our undergrads absolutely knocked it out of the park.

Competing for the first time, our six students came home with 1st, 2nd, and 5th place finishes:

🥇 1st Place: Julian Choi, Liyu Pan & Abra Geiger
🥈 2nd Place: Rohan Joshi & Leah Tang
🏅 5th Place: Jennifer Wang — a freshman who competed on her own against teams of upperclassmen!

A huge thank you to our SPS chapter for organizing this opportunity. We couldn't be more proud of these students. Here's to many more years of competing! ⚡

04/27/2026

On this episode of Radio Physics, Sasha Fielder sits down with renowned theoretical physicist Csaba Csáki to explore the frontiers of modern particle physics.

On this episode of Radio Physics, Sasha Fielder sits down with renowned theoretical physicist Csaba Csáki to explore the frontiers of modern particle physics.From the high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to the silent mystery of the cosmos, this interview breaks down the complex "mat...

04/24/2026

Georg Hoffstaetter de Torquat, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, is leading a $2.9 million Department of Energy grant project to support a bold venture: teaching artificial intelligence (AI) to operate particle accelerators, some of the most complex scientific machines on Earth.

Georg Hoffstaetter de Torquat, professor of physics in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, is leading a $2.9 million Department of Energy grant to teach AI to operate particle accelerators. Based at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the collaboration will train AI systems on computer models of two...

04/24/2026

"It's not that this is the magic material with Majorana fermions that's going to build a quantum computer," said Brad Ramshaw, associate professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, who led the Cornell team. "But it's also not this story of basically fancy dirt, where the samples have impurities that are bouncing the heat one way instead of another. It's a new intrinsic effect that nobody had ever seen before."

It was a head-spinning discovery. In 2018, researchers in Japan claimed to find concrete evidence of an elusive particle, a Majorana fermion, in a quantum spin liquid called ruthenium trichloride. Majoranas are highly sought-after by quantum materials scientists because when a pair are localized, or...

04/20/2026

Congratulations to Tyler Barrett, Robin Bjorkquist, Antoine Chapelain, Nic Eggert, Lawrence Gibbons, Zepyoor Khechadoorian, SeungCheon Kim, Kevin Labe, Wren Osar, Nate Rider, David Rubin, Charles Strohman, David Sweigart, & David Tarazona. Yuri Orlov & Alexander Mikhailachenko were also involved prior to their passing.

12/19/2025

“If gene expression does not proceed properly, it will lead to all kinds of problems. Abnormal cellular growth, cancer development and other disorders – they're all interconnected,” said Michelle Wang, the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, who led the project.

Researchers discovered that DNA packaging structures called nucleosomes, which have been traditionally seen as roadblocks for gene expression, actually help reduce torsional stress in DNA strands and facilitate genetic information decoding.