Cornell University Physics

09/03/2026

Thank you, Dave. Cornell Physics will miss you.

David Kornreich, Ph.D. ’01, who taught physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, died Aug. 30 in a plane crash near Ithaca. Kornreich, a native of Houston, Texas, was 52.

08/28/2026

Carini, associate laboratory director for discovery technologies at Brookhaven National Laboratory, will take over from Joel Brock, who has been the director since 2013.

08/17/2026

“Most people think of a cell as a bag of chemical reactions, but there are so many reactions that involve so many different molecules, that if cells were not organized, it would be chaos and we wouldn’t be able to do the reactions we need to stay alive.”

Physics researchers in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences developed a new framework to study how biomolecular condensates form and dissolve in cells. The tool reveals general rules of cellular organization and could help identify drug targets for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other condensa...

08/17/2026

"Watermarking has little impact in a world in which legitimate papers are written with AI, says Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a founder of the preprint repository arXiv. In mathematics, where AI has had a string of successes, many people assume that certain kinds of claims will be AI-assisted, he says. “Few will even bother to try to obfuscate a watermark.”"

New Claude models will watermark text and tag images as AI-generated, as Anthropic responds to EU AI regulations.

05/22/2026

For her volunteer outreach encouraging local children to learn about physics and reading, Abra Geiger ’26 has won the 2026 University Relations Campus-Community Leadership Award.

05/08/2026

Michael Niemack, professor of physics and astronomy (A&S) presented on Prime-Cam, the massive FYST instrument whose design he led. “I believe it to be the largest submillimeter instrument that’s ever been built, both in physical size and most importantly in the number of detectors,” he said, thousands of which can fit on a single silicon wafer.

Cornell University's Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) was formally inaugurated on April 9 in Chile's Atacama Desert, marking a new era in submillimeter astronomy. The CCAT Observatory partnership telescope, led by Cornell, will map galaxy formation, cosmic microwave background radiation, an...

05/04/2026

Researchers created a computational model that shows the effect of insects’ morphology on stabilizing their flight, which could provide a blueprint for designing flapping-wing robots.

05/01/2026

The work in the Ralph Group consists of making nanometer-size devices using equipment at the Cornell NanoScale Science Technology Facility (CNF) and studying their properties.

Physicist Dan Ralph, Ph.D. ’93, and materials scientist Darrell Schlom are Cornell’s 2026 electees to the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced April 28.

04/27/2026

Big congratulations are in order! 🎉

This year marked Cornell's very first participation in the RIT Physics Olympiad — and our undergrads absolutely knocked it out of the park.

Competing for the first time, our six students came home with 1st, 2nd, and 5th place finishes:

🥇 1st Place: Julian Choi, Liyu Pan & Abra Geiger
🥈 2nd Place: Rohan Joshi & Leah Tang
🏅 5th Place: Jennifer Wang — a freshman who competed on her own against teams of upperclassmen!

A huge thank you to our SPS chapter for organizing this opportunity. We couldn't be more proud of these students. Here's to many more years of competing! ⚡

04/27/2026

On this episode of Radio Physics, Sasha Fielder sits down with renowned theoretical physicist Csaba Csáki to explore the frontiers of modern particle physics.

On this episode of Radio Physics, Sasha Fielder sits down with renowned theoretical physicist Csaba Csáki to explore the frontiers of modern particle physics.From the high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to the silent mystery of the cosmos, this interview breaks down the complex "mat...