Avadh Saxena


Avadh B. Saxena is an American physicist and currently the Group Leader of Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA. His contributions cover a range of topics including phase transitions, functional materials, topological defects such as solitons and skyrmions, and Non-Hermitian quantum mechanics. Saxena completed his PhD at the Temple University in 1986. Subsequently, he held a joint postdoc position at the Materials Research Lab at Penn State and Cornell University. In 1990 he came to Los Alamos National Laboratory as a visiting scientist/consultant to the Theoretical Division, and in 1993 became a Technical Staff Member. In January 2006 he assumed the Deputy Group Leader position of the Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics Group and since January 2009 he is the Group Leader of T-4. He is currently also an affiliate professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and adjunct professor at the University of Barcelona, University of Crete, Greece, Virginia Tech, and University of Arizona, and scientific advisor at the National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba, Japan. He is a Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society and APS.

Academic career

Avadh has more than 450 publications with over 11,000 citations and an h-index of 51. He has also co-edited 5 Springer books and the sixth one on nonlinear science is underway in addition to several special journal issues. He has also co-organized over 50 international conferences on various research topics.
His main research interests include phase transitions, optical, electronic, vibrational, transport and magnetic properties of functional materials, device physics, soft condensed matter, geometry, topology and nonlinear phenomena. Recently he has been coordinating theoretical efforts at LANL in the context of Beyond Moore's Law quantum computing.
Saxena completed his PhD at the Temple University in 1986 under the supervision of James D. Gunton. In 1990 he was a visiting scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, becoming a Technical Staff Member in 1993. He is an affiliate professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and adjunct professor at the University of Barcelona, University of Crete, Greece, Virginia Tech, and University of Arizona. Avadh serves on many international advisory committees/boards, e.g., ICOMAT, CIMTEC, Deployable Quantum Computing, etc.

Most Cited Publications