Yale Physics Olympics 2026

The Yale Physics Department hosted the 2026 Yale Physics Olympics (YPO) on March 28 at Sloane Physics Laboratory. The event welcomed twenty-eight high school teams from across the Northeast for a full day of competition, where students participated in five unique physics events. This outreach program is free for high school students and has been running in the department since its establishment in 1998. 

The competition was directed by Paul Noel, manager of the Instructional Labs, and Caitlin Hansen, lecturer in physics and chair of the department’s outreach committee.

Every year, members of the Yale community volunteer to come together to design the events. The goal when designing the events is to test students’ skills in engineering, measurement, calculation, and estimation; encouraging them to apply physics concepts in creative and hands-on ways.  The five events in the 2026 YPO were developed by Aaron Greenberg and Theophilus Human, graduate students; Christian Cammarota, lecturer in  Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (MB&B); Prakhar Garg, research scientist; and Matthew Ennis, lecturer in physics. Twenty-four additional volunteers supported the day-of event.

2026 YPO events

Wind-to-Watt, was developed by Garg, with assistance from Ryan Hamilton, graduate student and Helen Caines, Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics. In this challenge, students designed and built windmills to generate electricity, with the goal of producing the highest voltage.

Garg reflected, “Leading the ‘Wind-to-Watt’ event was incredibly rewarding. Students applied real physics—balancing inertia, blade design, and angle—to turn wind into measurable power.”

The winning team designed a windmill that produced an output of 5.623 V. 

I Have Terrible Standards, developed by Human and tested by Erin McGee, graduate student, challenged students to derive quantities using unconventional units. The event highlighted the historical development of standard units in science and encouraged students to think critically about measurement systems.

In A Tense Situation, developed by Greenberg, students worked with springs of varying constants arranged in series and parallel. Using wooden dowels, teams aimed to achieve a precise final height for a suspended object, testing their understanding of forces and equilibrium. The winning team was only 0.25 mm off from the target height, having a smaller deviation from the target than that of the event creator when testing the event. 

Bent but Don’t Break was a collaborative event with the MB&B Department, led by Cammarota. In this interdisciplinary challenge, students assembled puzzle-like tiles representing a protein structure, attempting to minimize the system’s energy.

Cammarota noted, “It was exciting to see so many groups work through how to minimize the energy in such a complex system and watch their strategy evolve in real time. Many participants were able to intuit biophysical interactions based on their understanding of energy.”

A staple of YPO, the Fermi Quiz, tested students’ estimation skills. Developed by Ennis and led on the day of the event by Rona Ramos, graduate services coordinator, the quiz featured creative questions such as: “How many Great Lakes volumes does one water bottle hold?” (*Note: The answer to this question is at the end of this article!) 

While students competed, participating teachers took part in a “Make-and-Take” activity, which allows teachers to take something home to share with their students. The event was led by Noel and Katherine Schilling, associate director of Engineering student community and engagement. The teachers built and took home a mini speaker that drives a custom Chladni Plate made from PVC pipe and a balloon, allowing them to visualize standing wave patterns produced by sound.

The day concluded with a demonstration show led by graduate students Emily Pottebaum and Andrew Tamis, celebrating Tamis’s graduation from the Yale Physics Ph.D. program.

Pottebaum shared, “This was Andrew Tamis’s last demo show at Yale, so we presented some of his favorite demonstrations and even included a few pranks along the way. Thanks to all the participants for being a wonderful audience, and thank you to Andrew for one final show together.”

The awards

Teams were eligible to place first, second, or third in each event, as well as overall.

Hansen emphasized the structure of the competition, “What makes this competition particularly interesting is its emphasis on consistency. Teams that perform well across the board, even without winning individual events, can ultimately secure the top overall ranking.”

For 2026, the overall winning teams were:

• First Place: The Fermi and the Furious, Hopkins School (New Haven, CT)

• Second Place: Faraday Flunkies, E.O. Smith High School (Storrs, CT)

• Third Place: Newton’s Apples, Academy for Math, Science, and Engineering (Rockaway, New Jersey)

Additional spirit awards recognized creativity and enthusiasm:

• Best Team Name: Pulp Friction, Guilford High School (Guilford, CT)

• Best Costume: Schrödinger’s Paradox, Wilbur Cross High School (New Haven, CT)
   

*To wrap things up, here’s the answer to the Fermi question earlier: one water bottle holds about 10-17 Great Lakes volumes. Most teams guessed closer to 10-10, which means the average estimate was off by 10 million!

See below for link to photo album.