Portrait of Mingxuan Liu

Computational Astrophysics
Plasma & Fluid Dynamics

Department of Astronomy
University of Michigan
mgxnliu@umich.edu

Google Scholar Publications ORCID GitHub

Mingxuan Liu 刘明轩

PhD Candidate · Department of Astronomy · University of Michigan

I am a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan, working with Mateusz Ruszkowski. I work on plasma astrophysics: how turbulence, magnetic fields and cosmic rays move energy around in galaxies and galaxy clusters, and what that does to the gas.

Almost all of it is simulation. One strand is particle acceleration in turbulence driven by sheared flow, published in ApJ in 2026. In a newly completed manuscript on multiphase turbulence, we show how Ohmic and viscous dissipation concentrate heat in cold filaments, helping sustain gas near 104 K in cluster cores. The third is cosmic-ray transport, which I am starting now: measuring the scattering rate that sets how strongly cosmic rays couple to gas, rather than assuming it the way feedback models currently have to.

Before Michigan I was an undergraduate at Emory University, working with Elizabeth P. Hicks on Rayleigh–Taylor unstable flames. As a first-year there I also translated Janna Levin’s Black Hole Survival Guide into Chinese; it was published in 2022 and is rated 8.6 on Douban. I teach introductory astronomy at Michigan, and I have a husky named Vanilla.

Plasma astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics, cosmic-ray acceleration and transport, turbulence, multiphase gas, hydrodynamic instabilities, numerical methods, HPC and physics-informed neural networks.

News

Our paper Particle Acceleration in Magnetized Shear-driven Turbulence is now published in The Astrophysical Journal.
May 2026
Passed my candidacy exam and advanced to PhD candidacy. M.S. in Astronomy awarded en route.
Dec 2025
First paper of my PhD is on arXiv: arXiv:2512.12720.
Jul 2025
Presented a poster on shear-driven particle acceleration at the Midwest Magnetic Fields Workshop 2025, University of Wisconsin–Madison (July 9–11).
Nov 2024
Rayleigh–Taylor unstable flames: The effect of two-mode coupling published in Physical Review Fluids.
Graduated from Emory University with a B.S. in Physics (Astronomy concentration) and a B.S. in Informatics.
Nov 2023
Contributed talk at the 76th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, Washington D.C.
Jun 2022
My Chinese translation of Janna Levin’s Black Hole Survival Guide, 《黑洞旅行指南》, was published by 湖南文艺出版社.

What I work on

These all come back to the same thing: how ordered flow in a fluid or plasma breaks down, and where the energy ends up.