Publications

Everything below is first-author work, listed in reverse chronological order, with arXiv, journal and code links on each entry. A combined listing lives on Google Scholar, and my ORCID is 0009-0009-1522-9581.

Refereed publications

Magnetic field strength in a turbulent shear layer.

Particle Acceleration in Magnetized Shear-Driven Turbulence

Mingxuan Liu, Mateusz Ruszkowski, Ellen Zweibel, Xiaochen Sun, Damiano Caprioli, Naixin Liang, S. Peng Oh, Anatoly Spitkovsky

The Astrophysical Journal accepted, 2026

MHD-PIC simulations of particle acceleration in sustained, subsonic, non-relativistic magnetized turbulence driven purely by velocity shear, with full particle backreaction. Acceleration continues only while the turbulence is driven. The mechanism is the systematic distortion of gyro-orbits by turbulent electric fields, and the mean energy gain scales quadratically with shear velocity.

A Rayleigh-Taylor unstable flame front in the chaotic burning regime.

Rayleigh–Taylor unstable flames: The effect of two-mode coupling

Mingxuan Liu, Elizabeth P. Hicks

Physical Review Fluids 9, 113203 (2024)

Adding a reaction to a Rayleigh–Taylor unstable interface changes how short-wavelength modes couple into long ones. Two-mode coupling destabilizes a metastable traveling wave and drives an inverse cascade that produces a mode with wavenumber GCD(k1k2). We identify five distinct flame-growth solution types.

Talks & posters

Jul 2025

Particle Acceleration in Magnetized Shear-Driven Turbulence

Poster · Midwest Magnetic Fields Workshop 2025 · University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI · July 9–11, 2025

Nov 2023

Rayleigh-Taylor Unstable Flames: the Coupled Effect of Multiple Perturbations

Contributed talk (ZC40.5) · 76th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics · Washington, D.C. · November 21, 2023 — abstract

Code & data releases

Sep 2024

Rayleigh-Taylor Unstable Flames: the Effect of Two-Mode Coupling (Code and Data)

Zenodo v0.3.0 · Nek5000 setups, the RTUnstable Python analysis package and figure scripts · GPL-3.0-or-later — 10.5281/zenodo.13750992

Sep 2023

Rayleigh-Taylor Unstable Flames: the Coupled Effect of Multiple Perturbations (Code and Data)

Zenodo v0.1.0 · GPL-3.0-or-later — 10.5281/zenodo.8346919

Translation

Jun 2022

《黑洞旅行指南》 — Janna Levin, Black Hole Survival Guide

Sole translator (Chinese edition) · 湖南文艺出版社, June 2022 · ISBN 9787572606809 — more about the book