Hugo van der Hart was appointed as a Lecturer at Queen's in 1999. He was promoted to Reader in 2006 and to Professor in 2011. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Amsterdam. He then took up a Marie Curie Fellowship at Queen's, followed by postdoctoral positions at JILA/University of Colorado and the University of Oxford.

Research Interests

His main research interests concern the response of atoms to intense laser light, and the application of B-spline basis sets in atomic physics. He has extensive experience with the R-matrix-Floquet approach for atoms in long laser pulses, including the study of double ionization following two-photon absorption. Since 2006, he has been working on the development of time-dependent methods within R-matrix theory.

The main aim of the development of time-dependent R-matrix methods is the development of capcbility to describe how the interaction between electrons affects the overall atomic dynamics, including the dynamics in an intense laser field. Examples of processes in which a multi-electron response plays a critical role are
- ultra-fast dynamics within an atomic configuration
- harmonic generation in atomic ions such as Ar⁺

The accurate determination of atomic properties in intense fields requires large-scale atomic codes. Hence, great emphasis is placed on the efficient exploitation of high-performance computing facilities, using both MPI and OpenMP.