For decades, ferromagnetic materials have driven technologies like magnetic hard drives, magnetic random access memories and oscillators. But antiferromagnetic materials, if only they could be harnessed, hold out even greater promise: ultra-fast information transfer and communications at much higher frequencies – a “holy grail” for physicists.

A Cornell research team has employed a variation of a theory first used to predict the collective actions of electrons in quantum mechanical systems to a much taller, human system – the National Basketball Association.

Brad Ramshaw, associate professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and researcher in LASSP, has been named to the 2025 class of Brown Investigators. Each investigator, recognized for curiosity-driven research in chemistry or physics, will receive up to $2 million over five years.

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. 

Xiaomeng Liu, Department of Physics (A&S), will use his award to investigate anyons – emergent particles in two-dimensional materials – and their exotic properties, which hold potential for future fault-tolerant quantum computing. 

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.

Experts see peer recognition as important to student success in physics, and a new study gives college-level physics instructors insight into how students perceive the message from their classmates that “you’re good at physics.”

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.