Zesen Huang黄泽森

I study how the solar wind becomes turbulent — where the energy of its 1/f spectrum comes from, and what fine structures like magnetic switchbacks remember about the corona that launched them. My tools are magnetohydrodynamic simulations and in situ data from Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, and Ulysses.

I also build open agent infrastructure for science: software that lets AI systems run real heliophysics data pipelines — carefully, reproducibly, validated against known physics.

The solar wind is the one turbulent astrophysical plasma we can fly through. My work asks what its fluctuation spectrum is made of, where its energy comes from, and how its structures survive the journey from the corona to 1 AU.

• The 1/f range

  Energy sources and spectral evolution of solar-wind turbulence at the lowest frequencies — including evidence that the canonical 1/f range is not one phenomenon but two, with distinct origins.

  Parker Solar Probe · spectral analysis

• Fine structures

  Magnetic switchbacks, coherent structures, and low-frequency oscillations near the Alfvén surface — the wind's small-scale memory of the corona, traced across heliocentric distance.

  switchbacks · Alfvén surface

• MHD simulations

  Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the expanding solar wind — wave-action conservation, Gaussianization of the magnetic-field magnitude, pseudo-spectral solvers at scale.

  expanding-box MHD · parallel computing

• Multi-mission analysis

  In situ observations combined across missions and radial distances — from Parker Solar Probe's perihelia to Ulysses over the poles: one wind, many vantage points.

  PSP · Solar Orbiter · Ulysses

1. 2025
   Two Types of 1/f Range in Solar Wind Turbulence

   Zesen Huang et al. · The Astrophysical Journal Letters 990.2, L34
2. 2024
   Dominance of 2 Minute Oscillations near the Alfvén Surface

   Zesen Huang et al. · The Astrophysical Journal Letters 977.1, L12
3. 2024
   Solar Wind Structures from the Gaussianity of Magnetic Magnitude

   Zesen Huang et al. · The Astrophysical Journal Letters 973.1, L26
4. 2023
   New Observations of the Solar Wind 1/f Turbulence Spectrum from Parker Solar Probe

   Zesen Huang et al. · The Astrophysical Journal Letters 950.1, L8
5. 2022
   Conservation of Total Wave Action in the Expanding Solar Wind

   Zesen Huang et al. · The Astrophysical Journal 935.1, 60

Eighteen peer-reviewed articles in total, in The Astrophysical Journal, ApJ Letters, and JGR. Full record on NASA ADS and ORCID.

Every observational science is bounded by its instruments. These are mine — open software that lets AI agents work with real heliophysics data, and the runtime they live in. Roles are as recorded in each repository's public contributor history.

• SPEDAS Agent Kit

  Author spedas/spedas_agent_kit

  A unified MCP server for agentic heliophysics workflows, hosted under the SPEDAS organization: one data layer over NASA CDAWeb, the Planetary Data System, and SPICE geometry.

• LingTai 灵台

  Lead contributor Lingtai-AI/lingtai

  An open-source (Apache-2.0) runtime for networks of persistent AI agents collaborating over a shared mailbox — the substrate for my agent-science experiments, from research trackers to multi-agent review panels.

• XHelio

  Author huangzesen/xhelio

  An AI-powered natural-language interface for spacecraft and heliophysics data; its xhelio-cdaweb and xhelio-spice backends power the SPEDAS Agent Kit's data layer.

• HelioSI 501 corpus

  Author huangzesen/heliosi-501-corpus-skill

  501 heliophysics papers compiled into agent-native skills — literature an AI system can act on: hypothesis generation, experiment design, topic routing.

The through-line: the same discipline that validates a spectral solver against known physics applies to validating an agent's data pipeline against known physics.

1. 2024 — present

   Assistant Researcher, UCLA

   Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. Solar-wind turbulence and agent infrastructure for heliophysics.

2. 2024

   Ph.D., Geophysics & Space Physics, UCLA

   Dissertation on the drivers of solar-wind turbulence and its spectral evolution.

3. 2022

   M.S., Geophysics & Space Physics, UCLA

   MHD simulation and multi-spacecraft data analysis.

4. 2019

   B.S., Geophysics, USTC

   University of Science and Technology of China. Space-physics major; ranked 1st of 17.

• Bachelor Honor Grade (top 4%), USTC, 2019
• UCLA EPSS Department Fellowship, 2019

Standalone pages that live alongside these notes.

• Visual essay Switchback Explorer

  An interactive tour of magnetic switchbacks — the abrupt field reversals Parker Solar Probe flies through near the Sun. Heavy page: loads best on desktop.

  switch_back.html →
• Long-running tracker Data-Center Tracker

  An evolving panorama of US data-center construction — a physical substrate of the AI build-out, tracked over time.

  data-center-tracker/ →
• Research resource tracker Scientific Resources

  A dated, official-source tracker for scientific compute, API and cloud credits, and AI-for-science or open-science funding.

  scientific-resources/ →

Email

zesenhuang@g.ucla.edu

ORCID

0000-0001-9570-5975

NASA ADS

orcid:0000-0001-9570-5975

GitHub

github.com/huangzesen

Affiliation

Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, UCLA