Paul Malinowski, Klarman Fellow in physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, received the 2025 Martin and Beate Block Winter Award from the Aspen Center for Physics, awarded in recognition of outstanding achievements by a promising young physicist. 

Electrons – the carriers of electricity – are inherently quantum mechanical, exhibiting remarkable behaviors like tunneling through barriers, occupying multiple locations at the same time, and even becoming entangled over distances.

Cornell researchers in physics and engineering have created the smallest walking robot yet. Its mission: to be tiny enough to interact with waves of visible light and still move independently, so that it can maneuver to specific locations – in a tissue sample, for instance – to take images and measure forces at the scale of some of the body’s smallest structures.

John Hopfield, Ph.D. ’58, has received the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics.

The latest addition of microscale robotics at Cornell is a robot less than 1 millimeter in size that is printed as a 2D hexagonal “metasheet” but, with a jolt of electricity, morphs into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawls.

With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor.Since it was found to be a superconductor about five years ago, uranium ditelluride has created a lot of buzz in the quantum materials community – and a lot of confusion, with more than a dozen theories about the true nature of its superconducting properties. Some suggested valuable possibilities for quantum computing.

How do you know you are looking at a dog? What are the odds you are right? If you’re a machine-learning algorithm, you sift through thousands of images – and millions of probabilities – to arrive at the “true” answer, but different algorithms take different routes to get there. A collaboration between researchers from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to cut through that mindboggling amount of data and show that most successful deep neural networks follow a similar trajectory in the same “low-dimensional” space. “Some neural networks take different paths. They go at different speeds. But the striking thing is they’re all going the same way,” said James Sethna, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, who led the Cornell team.

Ranga Dias claimed to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductors, but the work was later retracted. An investigation by Nature’s news team reveals new details about what happened — and how institutions missed red flags.

A phase of matter called Bragg glass, which prior to now had been purely theoretical, has been observed in a laboratory setting. Researchers, including physicist Krishnanand Mallayya of Cornell University, found this strange phase within an alloy containing palladium, terbium, and tellurium (PdxErTe3), as documented in a study published in Nature Physics.

Chao-Ming Jian and his research group study the highly entangled quantum matter and exotic quantum criticalities. In particular, Jian focuses on understanding the topological properties of quantum matter and the universal behavior of many-body quantum entanglement both in and out of equilibrium.