New course sets sail on understanding physics–by boat
Students venture out onto Cayuga Lake for hands-on learning about wind speed, velocity, buoyancy, and more
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Uniquely versatile undergraduate and graduate programs, an unrivaled breadth of research training, and Nobel Prize-winning work in world class facilities, defines the Department of Physics at Cornell University as a national and global leader in physics training and education. The department has more than 40 active professors, approximately 180 graduate students and 65 undergraduate majors, and offers a full range of university-level work in physics, from general education courses for nonscientists to doctoral-level independent research.
Replica theory shows deep neural networks think alike
By David Nutt, Cornell Chronicle
March 12, 2024
How do you know you are looking at a dog? What are the odds you are right?
If you’re a machine-learning algorithm, you sift through thousands of images – and millions of probabilities – to arrive at the “true” answer, but different algorithms take different routes to get there.
A collaboration between researchers from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to cut through that mind-boggling amount of data and show that most successful deep neural networks follow a similar trajectory in the same “low-dimensional” space.
Read more here.
Physics Links
Physics News
Revealing the superconducting limit of ‘magic’ material
Cornell researchers have identified the highest achievable superconducting temperature of graphene – 60 Kelvin. The finding is mathematically exact and is spurring new insights into the factors that fundamentally control superconductivity.
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Physicist Yuval Grossman elected to American Physical Society
Yuval Grossman, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society for seminal contributions in “flavor” physics.
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Two-day ‘LepageFest’ honors physicist and former dean of A&S
The conference focused on the current status and future of heavy quark physics while highlighting the science Lepage has done throughout his career.
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Student spotlight: Elijah Sheridan
Elijah Sheridan, a doctoral student in physics from Lansing, Michigan, studies string theory under the guidance of Liam McAllister at Cornell.
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John Hopfield, Ph.D. ’58, wins Nobel Prize in physics 
Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto were honored for their work in training artificial neural networks.
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Leading particle physicist headlines fall 2024 Bethe Lectures
Beate Heinemann, professor at Universität Hamburg and director for particle physics at DESY in Germany, will share the stories of two outstanding women scientists in a public lecture.
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Indie drama depicts Cornellian couple's role in web history
Set in the 1980s, The Man Who Saved the Internet with a Sunflower chronicles two ’69 classmates in Silicon Valley
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Research Spotlight
Research in the department is organized in two laboratories, the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP) and the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics (LEPP). Explore the links below to learn more about the major research areas of the department and the facilities available to researchers.
Physics Events
Nov
25
Monday
04:00 PM
Department of Physics Colloquium, Professor Lionel Levine
Rockefeller Hall
201, Schwartz Auditorium
Dec
02
Monday
04:00 PM
Department of Physics Colloquium, Professor Yuta Michimura
Rockefeller Hall
201, Schwartz Auditorium