Mingxuan Liu 刘明轩

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, which came out in ApJ this year. A second, still in progress, is turbulence in multiphase gas; I will say more about that once it is written up. 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.