When he’s not conducting high-level research on fluid dynamics and granular materials, physics professor Justin Burton is on an ever-expanding quest: testing formulas and techniques to make the ultimate giant soap bubbles. Emory News recently interviewed Prof. Burton and his family on his quest to make the biggest bubble. Read more: https://news.emory.edu/features/2022/08/esc_quest-for-bigger-better-bubbles_01-08-2022/index.html

When water is sprinkled into an extremely hot frying pan, the droplets levitate just above the pan’s surface, sliding across it on vapor layers. This odd physical phenomenon, known as the Leidenfrost effect, was first described nearly three centuries ago, but many mysteries remain about its characteristics. Emory Physics graduate student Dana Harvey and Associate … More New Method Reveals Minimum Heat for Levitating Drops

Shortly before Jakobshavn Isbræ, a tidewater glacier in Greenland, calves massive chunks of ice into the ocean, there’s a sudden change in the slushy collection of icebergs floating along the glacier’s terminus, according to a new collaborative paper led by Dr. Ryan Cassotto (CIRES, UCBoulder) and Emory Physics faculty, Justin Burton. The work, published today … More Stopping an Iceberg

By: Stefan Boettcher This paper adds a new perspective on the venerable Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) spin glass model, which is a crucible of disorder and glassy behavior. It has applications not only in the physics of disordered materials, but also in AI (neural networks), brain function, combinatorial optimization, and machine learning, for example (see the book … More Ground State Properties of the Diluted Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Spin Glass