Biography
Dr. Suxing Hu is a Distinguished Scientist and Group Leader of the High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) Theory Group at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He also holds joint appointments as Professor of Physics (Research) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, as well as Professor (Research) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His group focuses on the fundamental understanding of material/plasma properties under extreme conditions such as warm dense matter and superdense matter encountered in inertial confinement fusion, planetary science, and astrophysics.
Dr. Hu started theoretical studies on how intense laser pulses interact with atoms, molecules, and clusters in the late 1990s. He earned his PhD in physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics. He received the Distinguished Graduate Award from CAS in 1998 (only the top 20 out of 50,000 graduate students received this award annually). Dr. Hu was also awarded the Hundred Outstanding Doctorate Thesis Prize by China’s Department of Education in 2000. After graduation, he accepted the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and continued his theoretical/computational Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics research at the University of Freiburg (with Dr. Christopher Keitel) and Max Born Institute (with Dr. Wilhelm Becker and Prof. Wolfgang Sandner) in Berlin, Germany. Having spent two years as a postdoc research associate at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (with Prof. Anthony Starace), Dr. Hu became a Director’s Postdoc Fellow working with Dr. Lee Collins at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2003. He joined LLE as a Scientist in 2006, became a Senior Scientist in 2013, and Distinguished Scientist in 2019. As a theoretician, he is interested in understanding how matter behaves under extreme conditions such as ultrahigh pressures [up to 100 petapascals (PPa)] and superstrong/ultrafast fields. He has published over 300 research articles in scientific journals that have received ~15,000 citations so far. For his significant contributions to ultrafast (attosecond) and strong-field physics, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013, by APS’s Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics.
Research Areas
- High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP): First-principles investigations on equation of state (EOS), transport properties, opacity, and stopping power of materials at extreme conditions through density functional theory (DFT)-based quantum molecular dynamics (QMD), orbital-free molecular dynamics, and path-integral Monte Carlo simulations
- Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF): Implementing/using accurate QMD-based EOS, transport, opacity, and stopping-power models in radiation–hydrodynamics codes for reliable ICF simulations; designing/analyzing integrated implosion and focused experiments to understand and control Rayleigh–Taylor instability growth (from laser imprint and other seeds); understanding thermonuclear burns in ICF targets through multidimensional radiation–hydrodynamics simulations
- Computational Physics: Developing time-dependent, mixed deterministic-stochastic density functional theory (TD-mDFT) codes for ab initio studies of high-energy-density physics, with advanced finite-element algorithms for quantum many-body systems; exploring new computational methods beyond mean-field DFT for high-energy-density sciences
- Intense/Ultrafast Laser Interactions with Atoms, Molecules, Clusters, Solids, and Plasmas: Understanding the ultrafast ionization and radiation behaviors in intense/ultrafast laser interactions with matter, with particular interest in many-electron correlation physics
Full publication list can be found here
