“Anterior forebrain pathway in parrots is necessary for producing vocalization with individual signatures” published in Current Biology on Dec. 8 with Zhao as first author. Co-authors from the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior (A&S) are: Jesse H. Goldberg, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior and Robert R. Capranica Fellow; research specialists Julie Carpenter and Brian Kardon; and undergraduate researcher Frieda Nemon. Co-authors from the Department of Physics (A&S) are Itai Cohen, professor of physics; and doctoral student Han Kheng Teoh.

The Physics Department at Cornell University invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the associate or full professor level in research areas relating to quantum physics, beginning July 1, 2024 at the earliest. Relevant areas include (but are not limited to) quantum information processing and communication, cold atoms and molecules, quantum materials, quantum devices and sensing, in either theory or experiment.

Eric D. Siggia received the Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics, which recognizes outstanding achievement in biological physics research. He earned the prize for powerful theoretical approaches to the physics of life and incisive connections between theory and experiment, from the mechanics of DNA to the dynamics of genetic networks, and from noise in gene expression to pattern formation in embryos and populations of stem cells. Siggia is the Viola Ward Brinning and Elbert Calhoun Brinning Professor at Rockefeller University in New York.

Researchers in the Kim Group predict a way to achieve fractionalization without a magnetic field, a theory they detail in “Fractionalization in Fractional Correlated Insulating States at n ± 1/3 Filled Twisted Bilayer Graphene,” published in Physical Review Letters Sept. 8. Dan Mao, a Bethe/Wilkins/Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP), is lead author. Kim and doctoral student Kevin Zhang are co-authors.

A team of 11 scientists reported in March in the journal Nature that they had discovered a room-temperature superconductor. Eight of those scientists have now asked Nature to retract their paper. That pits them against the man who led the research: Ranga P. Dias, a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Rochester in New York. In the past few years, Dr. Dias has made several extraordinary scientific claims, but he has also been embroiled in a series of allegations of scientific misconduct.

“It’s something like a dance in space,” said Jeevak Parpia, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “The effect of this pairing, called a ‘fluctuation,’ is to scatter other non-paired partners and disrupt the overall transport of momentum.”

The Biophysical Society is proud to announce its 2024 Society Fellows. This award honors the Society’s distinguished members who have demonstrated excellence in science and contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics. The Fellows will be honored at the Biophysical Society’s 68th Annual Meeting, being held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from February 10-14, 2024. Michelle D. Wang, Cornell University, USA, for advancing our understanding of transcription, replication, and chromatin dynamics through the lens of DNA mechanics and topology. 

Veit Elser of Cornell University has just described a new way to elucidate a problem that has baffled mathematicians for over a century: How densely can identical spheres be packed as the dimension of the spheres and of the space they occupy grow ever larger [1]? Schemes for densely packing spheres have been worked out in low dimensions and for two special cases: 8 and 24 dimensions. (A sphere in n-dimensional space is a set of points that are the same fixed distance away from a given center point.) Surprisingly, some schemes in high dimensions are little better than a random approach. What’s more, a century of research has failed to improve on the result from Hermann Minkowski, a German mathematician who came up with the concept of four-dimensional spacetime, that with each additional dimension, the highest fraction of space that can be occupied by spheres falls by a factor of 2. Intuitively, the rate of decrease should be slower.

Robust navigation is both critical for survival and dauntingly complex: Think of the speed and agility of an airborne fly. A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Itai Cohen, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, will use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to study how the brain forms a coherent representation from multisensory information, corrects for errors from perturbations and generates robust behaviors.

“Measuring the position of a quantum particle changes its momentum and vice versa. Similarly, for qubits there are quantities which change one another when they are measured. We find that certain random sequences of these incompatible measurements lead to the formation of a quantum spin-glass,” said Erich Mueller, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “One implication of our work is that some types of information are automatically protected in quantum algorithms which share the features of our model.”