“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. 

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.”

Applications for the Kavli 2023 Theory Postdoctoral Fellowships are now open! The deadline is September 29th, 2023.

Applications for the Kavli 2023 Experimental Postdoctoral Fellowships are now open! The deadline is October 14th, 2023.

In numerous strange metals, the characteristic time between electron collisions, with each other and against anything that they encounter in their path, is set by the Planck’s constant and the temperature, said Debanjan Chowdhury, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the paper. A vast majority of the known high-temperature superconductors, when heated above their superconducting temperature, exhibit this property. This is why it has been believed for a while that the clue to understanding the origin of high-temperature superconductivity lies in understanding the common thread across these materials that leads to this universal Planckian time scale.

A puppet theater group in Finland has created the world's smallest puppet theater after consulting with physicists around the world, including the Cohen Lab and other scientists at Cornell.

If “femininity” and “physicist” cannot coexist even in Barbieland, how are we ever to support their coexistence in the real world, Natasha Holmes asks.

A Cornell research team has developed a new way to design complex microscale machines, one that draws inspiration from the operation of proteins and hummingbird beaks. The group’s paper, “Bifurcation Instructed Design of Multistate Machines,” published Aug. 14 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author is Itay Griniasty, a Schmidt AI postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Itai Cohen, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.