I am a Professor in the Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, and a founding member of Center for Quantum Mathematics And Physics (QMAP).
I did my undergraduate study at Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics of Charles University in Prague in 2008. I got the PhD degree from Princeton University in 2013 under the supervision of Nima Arkani-Hamed. Then I was a Prize postdoctoral fellow at Walter Burke Institute at Caltech. In 2015 I started as an Assistant Professor and founding member of QMAP at UC Davis, in 2019 I was promoted to an Associate Professor, and since 2022 I am a Full Professor.
My research interests are: quantum field theory, supersymmetry, and string theory. I am working on exploring new mathematical structures in scattering amplitudes, mainly in the context of maximally supersymmetric gauge theory and gravity. Recently, we found that in the planar limit of N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory the amplitudes can be calculated as volumes of Amplituhedron (see nice review in Quanta magazine or the New Scientist). Currently I am working on the extension of this picture to other quantum field theories including QCD and Einstein gravity. See my CV for more details.
Awards: In 2020 I won the Henry Primakoff award from American Physical Society. In 2018, I was awarded Young Scientist Prize in Particles and Fields from the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). I also received Chancellor’s Fellowship and Distinguished teaching award from UC Davis, as well as the UC Davis Award for Innovation and Creative Vision, read article here. In 2024 I received Frontiers of Science Award in Theoretical Physics.
Amplitudes conferences: In last few years, I organized the annual Amplitudes 2022 conference in Prague, summer program Novel Developments in Scattering amplitudes in Munich the Amplitudes and Cosmology workshop at ICTP in Trieste. I also organized specialized virtual Geomplitudes workshops. In June 2018, I organized Amplitudes Summer School as the QMAP event at UC Davis which contains a lot of resources for prospective students and postdocs.
Snowmass process: Together with Zvi Bern we are topical conveners of TF04: Scattering amplitudes of the 2021 Snowmass process.
Office address:
Department of Physics,
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616 USA
Email: trnka at ucdavis.edu