Zhanghao Zhouyin

Keep a light on for curiosity.

I work between physics and AI, trying to understand a little more of the world — and to keep a light on for others who want to know too.

麦吉尔大学物理博士生 · 电子结构、量子输运、科学计算
研究工作与论文:Research ↗
Physics PhD candidate at McGill University · electronic structure, quantum transport and scientific computing
Research & publications ↗

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The first flame

It began with a small flame.

In my grandmother's house, a rush-wick oil lamp always burned before the family altar — a shallow brass dish, a little cooking oil, a flame the size of a soybean, yet it almost never went out. Over the years the oil turned to grease and the grease to a waxy crust on the dish, with a faint smell like a candle. I would sit beside it — trimming the wick, watching the flame swell and shrink, burning small things: a stick of incense, a scrap of paper, a strand of hair, an ant I had caught. Back then the play had no purpose; it was only curiosity. Other motives are mixed in now, but the heart of it hasn't changed. CS, AI, physics — underneath them all is still the same simple wish to understand the world.

Essays

Thinking out loud, in progress — on discovery, building, AI and science, and the way there.

All essays → Study notes →

Things I've found

Finished research and discoveries.

Moiré phonon figure

A structural change involving more than ten thousand atoms turned out to be governed by just two collective motions.

Moiré Phonon Condensation in Magic-Angle Twisted Bilayer Graphene

2026preprint
SLEM figure

A neural network can read only a material’s local structure and predict its quantum operators directly — reaching near first-principles accuracy while staying local enough to scale toward whole devices.

Learning local equivariant representations for quantum operators (SLEM)

2025ICLR 2025
NQS impurity solver figure

Neural quantum states can act as the impurity solver inside quantum embedding, matching exact diagonalization on correlated models — where the real bottleneck is how precisely you sample observables, not training the network.

Neural-Quantum-States Impurity Solver for Quantum Embedding Problems

2026Phys. Rev. B
DeePTB figure

Trained only on first-principles eigenvalues, a deep-learning tight-binding model predicts the electronic structure of structures it has never seen — making million-atom, finite-temperature electronic simulations feasible.

Deep learning tight-binding approach for large-scale electronic simulations (DeePTB)

2024Nature Communications
AD-NEGF figure

Making the non-equilibrium Green’s function method differentiable end to end turns a quantum transport simulator into something you can optimize through — providing gradients for sensitivity analysis and inverse design.

Automatic differentiable nonequilibrium Green's function formalism (AD-NEGF)

2023Phys. Rev. B
All publications → 研究Research →

What I'm building

Building tools that help people understand the world.

DeePTB

open source · active

A deep-learning tight-binding framework that predicts electronic structure at close to first-principles accuracy, for a fraction of the cost — built for researchers who need large-scale quantum simulations without a supercomputer’s budget.

github.com/deepmodeling/DeePTB ↗

And a few things still forming — AI-native DFT, scientific agents, and the beginnings of new project around.

Zhanghao Zhouyin

About

Zhanghao Zhouyin

I trained early in computer science and electronic engineering, then followed a stubborn question — what is the physical world behind all this technology? — into materials, quantum transport, and computational physics. Today I work where physics, machine learning, and scientific computing meet. Lately I’ve been trying to make AI agents that don’t just organize references or write code, but genuinely take part: proposing hypotheses, designing calculations, finding hidden structure. Whether it becomes research, software, or something I build, the question stays the same — can we make better scientific tools, so that individuals and small teams can understand complex things, test their ideas, and create.

PhD candidate, Physics · McGill University Contributor: DeePTB · DFTio · AD-NEGF · VBCSR

更多介绍About my work ↗  ·  Full CV & history ↗

Some questions are better explored together.

I’m always glad to talk about scientific tools, AI for discovery, and ambitious problems worth building around.