I am Tingyu Chen, an MPhys Physics with Theoretical Physics student at the University of Manchester. I am mostly interested in problems where physics and computation meet: collider data, Monte Carlo methods, numerical modelling, detector simulation, and the computational side of condensed-matter theory.
I use this site as a working notebook. Some posts are records of projects I have finished; others are explanations I wanted to write down before the details disappeared from memory. The subjects will move around, but they usually return to physics, scientific programming, or tools that have changed how I work.
What I have been working on
My particle-physics work includes an analysis of $Z\to\ell^+\ell^-$ production with ATLAS Open Data. I built the event-selection and reconstruction workflow, compared collision data with weighted Monte Carlo samples, extracted electron- and muon-channel cross sections, and followed an isolation anomaly into a small final-state-radiation recovery study.
I have also worked on a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulation of phase transitions in a three-dimensional lattice model, an object-oriented C++ detector simulation inspired by ATLAS, and an agent-based crowd-evacuation model based on the Social Force Model. These projects taught me rather different things, but they all involved the same practical loop: turn a physical question into a model, make the model testable, and then work out whether the output means what I think it means.
Alongside that, I am studying topological band theory and topological materials, particularly Weyl points, nodal lines, Euler-class diagnostics, and non-Abelian reciprocal braiding in momentum space. This is the part of my work that currently feels the most open-ended, which is probably why I keep returning to it.
Tools and interests
I mainly work in Python and C++, with CUDA when a problem is naturally parallel. I also use Mathematica and MATLAB, and I am comfortable with the less glamorous parts of research computing: data cleaning, reproducible analysis, debugging, plotting, version control, and writing down enough context that a result can still be understood months later.
Outside a specific project, I am interested in high-energy physics, quantum and condensed-matter theory, complex physical systems, numerical methods, and the use of AI tools in scientific and software work.
You can find my code and project notes on GitHub.