Rate My Professor Artem Rudenko

Artem Rudenko is the Cortelyou-Rust Professor of Physics and Director of the James R. Macdonald Laboratory in the Department of Physics at Kansas State University. Born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine, he earned an M.S. in 1998 and a Ph.D. in Physics in 2002 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Prior to joining Kansas State University in 2012 as an assistant professor and member of the James R. Macdonald Laboratory, he spent ten years working for the Max Planck Society in Germany, first as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and later at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg. He was promoted to associate professor in 2017, full professor in 2021, became laboratory director in summer 2022, and was named the inaugural Cortelyou-Rust Chair in the physics department that year.

Rudenko's research specializes in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, with a focus on the interaction of intense and short-pulsed radiation with matter. His group studies the behavior of atoms, molecules, clusters, and nano-scale particles under irradiation with intense infrared, optical, XUV, or X-ray light, employing ultrafast light sources to image photo-induced phenomena on femtosecond and attosecond timescales. They utilize techniques such as Cold-Target Recoil Ion Momentum Spectroscopy, Velocity Map Imaging, and other reaction microscopes to capture snapshots of electronic structure and nuclear geometry, creating molecular movies of ultrafast processes like multi-electron ionization, ro-vibrational dynamics, and interatomic Coulombic decay. Experiments are conducted at facilities including the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, FLASH in Hamburg, and SACLA in Japan, supported by grants from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, including participation in a $90.8 million NSF Physics Frontiers Center award in 2023. Rudenko has published over 190 research articles, delivered more than 90 invited lectures, and received the Vacuum Ultraviolet & X-Ray Physics Conference Award. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society by the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics for outstanding contributions to correlated few-particle dynamics in strong-field interactions with atoms and molecules and leadership in coincident molecular imaging at X-ray free-electron laser facilities. Key publications include 'Pulse Energy and Pulse Duration Effects in the Ionization and Fragmentation of Iodomethane by Ultraintense Hard X Rays' (Physical Review Letters 127, 093202, 2021) and 'Simple model for sequential multiphoton ionization by ultraintense x rays' (Physical Review A 104, 033115, 2021).