Liu Chen (physicist)


Liu Chen is a Taiwanese-American theoretical physicist who has made original contributions to many aspects of plasma physics. He is known for the discoveries of kinetic Alfven waves, toroidal Alfven eigenmodes, and energetic particle modes; the theories of geomagnetic pulsations, Alfven wave heating, and fishbone oscillations, and the first formulation of nonlinear gyrokinetic equations. Chen retired from University of California, Irvine in 2012, assuming the title professor emeritus of physics and astronomy.

Early life and education

Chen was born in 1946 in Hangzhou, with his ancestral home in Yuyao. Chen's ancestral family name is Huang. He is a descendant of Cheng-liang Huang, founder of the Five-Osmanthus Building library, and the prominent philosopher Zongxi Huang. His great-grandfather, Cheng-yi Huang was the mayor of Taiwan County during the Guangxu period of the Qing dynasty.
In 1950, after the Kuomintang defeat in the Chinese Civil War, Chen left mainland China during the Retreat of the government of the [Republic of China to Taiwan|Great Retreat] with his mother, Shyue Yan King Chen, and three siblings. They joined his father, Lee Chen, at the Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp in Hong Kong, where he began his education. The Chen family then moved to Taiwan in 1951.
After graduating from the Affiliated [Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University] in 1962, Chen attended National Taiwan University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1966. He then left Taiwan in 1967 to complete graduate studies in the United States. He earned a Master of Science from Washington State University, Pullman, in 1969, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. His doctoral dissertation, completed under Charles K. Birdsall, was titled, "I. Heating of Magnetized Plasmas by Large-Amplitude Electric Field. II. Reduction of the Grid Effects in Simulation Plasmas."

Academic career

From 1972 to 1974, Chen did his postdoctoral research with Akira Hasegawa at the Bell Labs. They developed a theory for long-period magnetic pulsations in the magnetosphere based on resonant coupling between hydromagnetic compressional waves and transverse Alfvén continuous spectrum. This theory, later referred to as Chen-Hasegawa field-line-resonance model, successfully explained the observations in the Earth's magnetosphere by Louis J. Lanzerotti, and has become the standard model for magnetic pulsations in the Earth's and other planetary magnetospheres. Soon, their focus turned to the charged particle heating via resonant absorption within Alfvén wave continuous spectrum. They discovered the Kinetic Alfvén wave, which resolves the logarithmic singularity of magnetohydrodynamic shear Alfvén waves and plays important roles in the heating, acceleration and transport of charged particles in solar, magnetospheric, and laboratory plasmas.
From 1974, Chen worked for 19 years at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Princeton University, there his interest was directed to the study of fusion plasmas. He, in collaboration with Edward A. Frieman, formulated and derived the first nonlinear gyrokinetic equation, the Frieman-Chen equation named in their honor, which has played a fundamental role in the physics understanding of strongly magnetized plasmas in the last decades. With Chio-Zong Cheng and Morrell S. Chance, Chen predicted the existence of hydromagnetic Alfvén bound states in laboratory plasmas due to realistic symmetry-breaking equilibrium conditions. These hydromagnetic Alfvén bound states were later observed in worldwide plasma experimental devices. Chen is also well known for his collaboration with Roscoe White and Marshall Rosenbluth in demonstrating theoretically that supra-thermal energetic particles can spontaneously excite in laboratory plasmas a unique macroscopic hydromagnetic wave, observed experimentally as “fishbones” from the magnetic signals. From 1986 until 1993, Chen served as the deputy head of the Theory Department at PPPL.
In 1993, Chen became a professor of Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. During this period, Chen discovered the existence of energetic-particle modes within the shear Alfvén wave continuous spectrum and introduced a unified theoretical framework to understand the distinctive features of different Alfvén bound states and energetic-particle continuum modes. Subsequently, in the past two decades, this theory was generalized by a series of papers written jointly with Fulvio Zonca, and named as the general fishbone-like dispersion relation. In 2000, Chen and coworkers elucidated that drift wave turbulence can spontaneously generate coherent zonal flows via intensity-modulation interactions, resulting in turbulence self-regulation. This nonlinear process has a broad scope of applications and has been generalized to the zonal structures in charged particle phase space. Chen retired from UCI in 2012.
Chen visited mainland China in 1975 for the first time after the normalization of US-China relationship. Chen has, throughout the years, played active roles in the development of plasma physics research as well as training next generation of plasma physicists both in mainland China and Taiwan. In 1985, Chen helped Shih-Tung Tsai and Changxuan Yu to establish the Chinese Summer School for Plasma Physics. In 2007, Chen initiated the Cross-Strait Symposium on the Fusion Energy and Plasma Science. Chen served, from 1997 to 2016, as the Founding Chairman of Foundation of Shih-Tung Tsai Award for Plasma Physics. Chen was appointed as an Honorary Research Professor at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, in 1990, Visiting Kuang-Piu Chair Professor at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, in 2004, and Visiting Kuo-Ting Chair Professor at National Central University, Zhongli, Taiwan, in 2007. From 2006 to 2016, Chen served as the founding director of the Institute for Fusion Theory and Simulation at Zhejiang University. In 2016, Chen became the director emeritus.
Chen has also published a graduate textbook Waves and Instabilities in Plasmas, and nurtured generations of graduate students and postdocs worldwide.

Personal life

Chen married to Shingshah Lee in August 1969. They have one son, Chen Pei-jin.

Honors and awards