Rate My Professor Hang Yu

Hang Yu is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Montana State University, having joined the Department of Physics in 2023. He completed his Ph.D. in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2014 to 2019 and earned his B.S. in Physics with honors from Johns Hopkins University between 2012 and 2014. Following his doctoral studies, Yu served as a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology from 2019 to 2022. Subsequently, he took up a Postdoctoral Scholar position at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, beginning in 2022.

Yu's research bridges theory and experiment in gravitational wave astrophysics. His theoretical work explores tidal interactions and the evolution of diverse astrophysical systems, such as migrating proto-hot Jupiters, coalescing binaries of compact objects, tides within binaries, and hierarchical triple systems affected by Newtonian and post-Newtonian dynamics. Experimentally, he has contributed to advancing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) by improving its sensitivity, acting as a commissioner primarily at the Hanford site, and utilizing machine learning to detect binary black hole mergers in LIGO data. In 2026, Yu was awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER grant worth $400,000 to support his investigations into dynamical tides. He also received a NASA grant titled 'Dynamical tides in the high-eccentricity migration of close-in exoplanetary systems.' His scholarly output includes peer-reviewed articles such as 'Dynamical Tide-modified Roche Limit in Eccentric, Asynchronous Binaries' (2026, The Astrophysical Journal), 'Effective-one-body model for coalescing binary neutron stars' (2025, Physical Review D), 'Resonance locking of anharmonic 𝑔-modes in coalescing neutron-star binaries' (2025), 'Gravitational Radiation-Driven Chaotic Tide in a White Dwarf' (2025), and 'Tides in the High-eccentricity Migration of Hot Jupiters: Triggering Diffusive Growth by Nonlinear Mode Interactions' (2021, The Astrophysical Journal). Yu reviews manuscripts for journals including Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, The Astrophysical Journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity, and Physical Scripta. As part of Montana State University's eXtreme Gravity Institute, he supervises graduate students, one of whom secured a NASA fellowship in 2025 for gravitational wave studies. His contributions enhance the comprehension of nonlinear hydrodynamics and tidal effects in gravitational wave sources.