News: Research

Read the latest news from the Department of Physics

Research

New Simulation Reveals Secrets of Exotic Form of Electrons called Polarons

Feliciano Giustino leads effort to turn computational predictions into new materials.

Illustration of atoms in a two dimensional material

Research

Inspired by Biology, Physicists Make More Efficient Motors

Learn about how UT Austin physicists are using human muscles to design more efficiently designed robots.

A motor with an orange longhorn logo

Research

Department of Energy Selects Timothy Liao for Graduate Student Research Program

UT Austin's Timothy Liao has been selected to participate in a research program where he will develop computational tools for material design and discovery.

Portrait of a young man

Research

Seven Natural Sciences Faculty Receive NSF CAREER Awards

Learn about faculty members from UT Austin's College of Natural Sciences who have been awarded CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation.

Headshots of 7 faculty members

The Texas Scientist

Charging Ahead: The Path to a Clean Energy Future

Clean energy research from UT Austin scientists holds disruptive potential. It comes just as new technologies are needed most.

A solar panel illustration indicates power being generated in a landscape with cacti and billowing peaceful clouds in the sky.

Research

New Phononic Crystal Might Enable Better Mobile Communications

UT Austin researchers' new acoustic component, made of aluminum nitride and configured into periodic phononic crystals, allows engineers to direct high frequency elastic waves along predefined paths, including sharp turns and splits, without losing signal.

Light colored pattern on a dark orange background. A path zigs from the right to left like a backward letter Z.

Texas Scientist

Charging Ahead

Chemists and physicists are making steady progress on developing new materials that may prove key for our future energy needs.

Illustration of a lightning bolt containing cacti and a cloudy sky

Research

First-Gen Student Navigates Own Path, Helps Others Chart Theirs

Guillermo Lezama who studies physics at UT Austin talks about how he became interested in the subject and his experience being a first-generation college student.

Portrait of a young man

Research

New Gravitational Wave Catalog Reveals Black Holes of ‘All Shapes and Sizes’

In a paper published Nov. 7th on the preprint server ArXiv, the team has detected a further 35 gravitational wave events since the last catalog release in October 2020, bringing to 90 the total number of observed events since gravitational-wave observations began.

Chart showing masses of more than 100 black holes and neutron stars detected by gravitational waves

Research

New Model Reveals How Chromosomes Get Packed Up

The first theoretical model of condensin, a molecular machine involved in packing and unpacking chromosomes, accurately reproduces all known experiments with just two parameters.

Illustrations of a molecule in two states, open and closed