Suxing Hu

Biography

Dr. Suxing Hu is a Distinguished Scientist and Group Leader of the theoretical High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) Group at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester. His group focuses on the fundamental understanding of material/plasma properties under extreme conditions such as warm dense 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 late-1990s. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics in 1998. 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 AMO 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 and 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 peta-pascals (PPa)] and super-strong/ultrafast fields. He has published over 220 research articles in scientific journals that have received ~8000 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 (DAMOP).

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-based quantum molecular dynamics (QMD), orbital-free molecular dynamics (OFMD), and path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) 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 density-functional-theory (TD-DFT) codes for ab initio studies of high-energy-density plasmas; exploring new rezoning/regriding strategies in Lagrangian hydrodynamics; developing advanced finite-element algorithms for quantum/classical simulations of many-body systems; Exploring new computational methods beyond mean-field DFT for HED 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

Full publication list can be found here