Physics

The smallest exoplanets yet discovered orbit a dwarf star almost identical to Barnard’s star, one of the Sun’s nearest neighbors. The similarity helped the astronomers calculate the size of the distant planets. Read More

  Vanderbilt's virtual control room for the CMS detector that allows scientists and students to participate in meetings, monitor the experiment and analyze the data that it produces (John Russell / Vanderbilt University) After the most complete search yet, the world’s largest atom smasher, the… Read More

A team of scientists has taken a major step toward developing robot biologists. They have shown that their system, the Automated Biology Explorer, can solve a complicated biology problem from scratch. Read More

Astronomer David Weintraub has given introductory astronomy a “CSI” format by following the scientific evidence that gives us the age of the universe and has put this in a popular science book. Read More

A team of Vanderbilt engineers have developed a rapid and low-cost imprinting process that can stamp out a variety of devices that have unique optical, electrical, chemical and mechanical properties. Read More

I’ve always been fascinated, and occasionally frustrated, by the tendency of string, yarn, rope and wire – any thing that is long, thin and flexible – to knot and tangle. Fields Medal winner Vaughan F.R. Jones Clearly, I’m not the only one. Mathematicians have been studying knots… Read More

There is a new dark-horse entry in the cosmological sweepstakes. Cosmologists Alan Guth, left, and Paul Steinhardt In the last 50 years, the Big Bang theory has gradually become the standard scientific model for how the universe began and has been written into the grade school science… Read More

Prof. Thomas Weiler, right, and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho (John Russell / Vanderbilt) If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be… Read More

Vanderbilt physicist Robert Scherrer supplements his scientific research with writing science fiction stories. Bob Scherrer is bicultural: Not only is he a practicing theoretical physicist, but the chairman of Vanderbilt’s physics department is also a published author of science fiction. Several years ago we did a… Read More

Physicist James Dickerson, left, and graduate student Saad Hasan (Photo by Daniel Dubois) Windshields that shed water so effectively that they don’t need wipers.  Ship hulls so slippery that they glide through the water more efficiently than ordinary hulls. These are some of the potential applications for graphene, one of… Read More