Brief Vita

• Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, and Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2023 – present)
• Postdoctoral Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2019 – 2022)
• PhD, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids and Leibniz Institute, Dresden (2019)
• BS, Physics and Mathematics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China (2015)

Selected Honors

• International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Early Career Scientist Prize in Computational Physics (2024)
• Otto Hahn medal, Max Planck Society, Germany (2020)
• Best Doctoral Thesis Award, SFB1143, TU Dresden (2019)
• Tschirnhaus Medal, Leibniz Association, Germany (2019)

Research Areas

My research interest lies in understanding the topological states, quantum transport, and light-matter interaction in topological/strongly correlated materials and their potential applications for future quantum technology. I have worked in the areas of antiferromagnetic spintronics, nonlinear optics, moiré semiconductor, transport in Hubbard model system, material informatics, and machine learning. My research tools combine analytical methods with various numerical techniques for ground state and response properties, including density functional theory (with a focus on wannierization and response simulation), exact diagonalization, density-matrix renormalization group, and variational Monte Carlo. I am also greatly interested in high performance computing, for the study of large-scale quantum systems with massive parallelization in CPU/GPU platforms.

For Prospective Students

I currently have positions available for highly motivated undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in theoretical/computational condensed matter physics. If you are interested, please e-mail me or stop by my office.

Selected Publications

1. Y Zhang, T Devakul, and L Fu, “Spin-textured Chern bands in AB-stacked transition metal dichalcogenide bilayers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 36 (2021).
2. T Li*, S Jiang*, B Shen*, Y Zhang*, L Li, T Devakul, K Watanabe, T Taniguchi, T Taniguchi, L Fu, J Shan, and KF Mak, “Quantum anomalous Hall effect from intertwined moir\’e bands,” Nature 600 641–646 (2021).
3. T Devakul*, V Crépel, Y Zhang*, and L Fu, “Magic in twisted transition metal dichalcogenide bilayers,” Nature Communications 12 6730 (2021).
4. Y Zhang, NFQ Yuan, and L Fu, “Moiré quantum chemistry: charge transfer in transition metal dichalcogenide superlattices,” Physical Review B 102 201115(R) (2020).
5. Y Zhang and L Fu, “Terahertz detection based on nonlinear Hall effect without magnetic field,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 21 (2021).
6. Z Ni*, K Wang*, Y Zhang*, O Pozo, B Xu, X Han, K Manna, J Paglione, C Felser, AG Grushin, EJ Mele, and Liang Wu, “Giant topological longitudinal circuarly photogalvanic effect in the chiral multifold semimetal CoSi,” Nature Communications 12 154 (2021).
7. Y Zhang, T Holder, H Ishizuka, F de Juan, N Nagaosa, C Felser, B Yan, “Switchable magnetic bulk photovoltaic effect in the two-dimensional magnet CrI₃,” Nature Communications 10 3783 (2019).
8. Y Zhang, Y Sun, B Yan, “The Berry curvature dipole in Weyl semimetal materials: an ab initio study,” Phys. Rev. B 97 041101(R) (2018).

Please see my Google scholar profile for a complete list of publications.