Dr. Suxing Hu, senior scientist in the theory division of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) at the University of Rochester, has been named an American Physical Society Fellow for his work on physics that happens in ultrafast times: attosecond physics.
An attosecond is an incredibly short amount of time; it is one quintillionth of a second or, for context, an attosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.71 billion years, or more than twice the age of the universe. Some of his key results provide insight into the probing of ultrafast electron-electron correlations in atoms and molecules.
Hu described the work, published in Physical Review Letters, as potentially providing "a substantial advance in the rapidly developing field of attosecond science." He added that the result could aid physicists, chemists and biologists to examine and manipulate ultrafast motions of electrons in atoms, molecules, clusters and even nanostructures.
Hu joined the LLE as a scientist in 2006 and works in inertial-confinement fusion, as well as the areas of atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics to advance the understanding of ultrafast dynamics and radiations of quantum few-body systems exposed to intense and ultrashort laser pulses.
Before joining the LLE, Hu was a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the department of physics & astronomy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Born-Institut in Berlin, Germany. Hu holds a B.S. in theoretical physics from Guizhou University, China, and Ph.D. in physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Optics & Fine Mechanics, China.
Hu has published over 100 peer reviewed articles. He has served as a reviewer to DOE and NSF programs and also is often a referee for many physics journals, including Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Optics Letters, Physical Review A/B/E, Plasma Physics, and Nuclear Fusion.
In announcing the fellowship, the American Physical Society cited as his major contributions "attosecond probes of electron correlations in atoms, attosecond imaging of ultrafast atomic and molecular processes, relativistic laser acceleration of electrons, and the development of accurate numerical methods for intense laser interactions with atoms and molecules."