Intro

I came from China originally but have been trotting the globe since graduating high school in 2015.

First I moved across the big pond to the US for university studies and took ample opportunities to travel around the Americas -- from the vast wilderness of the Rockies to the marvelous ancient ruins of the Aztec and Inca.

Three years later in 2018, I flew across an arguably smaller pond to the UK for further studies. Of course the adventures continued in the myriad of historic cities soaked in time -- Edinburgh, Florence, Tunis...

Then in 2020, I moved to the cozy land of fika, Sweden, and have been doing my PhD here since. The journey continues...

Physics

Gravitational waves (GWs) and cosmology are my main areas of interest. In particular, I study GWs produced by primordial magnetic fields in the early universe, specifically during the reheating era and later at the cosmological phase transitions in the radiation era. As GWs are usually the only observable from the very early universe that survive until the present day, they provide valuable insight into the turbulent physics at the very early times that would be otherwise inaccessible to us.

Another aspect I am interested in is the phenomenology of gravity theories alternative to general relativity (GR). As full theories, modified gravity presents a vast and complex space of possibilities. But at the level of GWs, as a result of linearization, only a handful of additional parameters enter and modify the standard GW equation in GR. Therefore, GW spectrum also serves as a phenomenological window into the parameter space of modified gravity.

Publications:

9. Inverse Gertsenshtein effect as a probe of high-frequency gravitational waves

8. Modified propagation of gravitational waves from the early radiation era

7. Modified gravity approaches to the cosmological constant problem

6. Gravitational waves from primordial magnetic sources (Licentiate thesis)

5. Leading-order nonlinear gravitational waves from reheating magnetogeneses

4. Simulations of Helical Inflationary Magnetogenesis and Gravitational Waves

3. Tensor spectrum of turbulence-sourced gravitational waves as a constraint on graviton mass

2. Can we observe the QCD phase transition-generated gravitational waves through pulsar timing arrays?

1. Relic Gravitational Waves from the Chiral Magnetic Effect

Sci-fi

Movies/TV or books alike, sci-fi is my favourite genre.

Some of my favourite authors are: Cixin Liu, Peter Watts, Ted Chiang, Arthur Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin.

In 2022, I started trying sci-fi writing myself and participated in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an annual event that challenges aspiring writers to draft up a 50000-word novel in the month of November.

Well, I achieved a little over a quarter of that goal the first time around... 2023? We'll see!

Visualisation

My most recent interest is transforming data into visually digestable presentations. Here are some examples.

Photography

A mini-selection of the sights around the world, as part of my amateur photobook in the making.

CV & Contact

A short CV is listed below. The full version can be made available upon request, preferrably sent to yutong.he@su.se. An alternative email address is yutonghe96@gmail.com.

Education

2020 - 2024 PhD Astronomy Nordita & Stockholm University
2019 - 2020 MSc Gravitational Wave Physics Cardiff University
2018 - 2019 MSc Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces Imperial College London
2015 - 2018 BSc Physics University of Pittsburgh

Work

2022 Teaching assistant (astrophysical radiation processes) Stockholm University
2022 Editing assistant (departmental compendium) Stockholm University
2021 Private tutor (maths & physics) Cardiff
2020 Demonstrator (optics) Cardiff University
2019 Demonstrator (environmental physics) Cardiff University
2019 Tutor (grade school maths) Chelsea Academy
2018 Teaching assistant (physics & astronomy) University of Pittsburgh