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, and was elected to American Physical Society.
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, and the upcoming ICTS workshop on positive geometry. 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.
Students: I currently supervise two PhD students Taro Brown and Umut Oktem, and one undergraduate student Justin Lemmon.
Office address:
Department of Physics,
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616 USA
Email: trnka at ucdavis.edu