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Jacob Bourjaily

Jacob Bourjaily — Associate Professor — Faculty
Office: 321A Osmond Laboratory
Address: 104 Davey Laboratory University Park, PA 16802 US
bourjaily@psu.edu
+1 814 865 7533
Jacob Bourjaily
Physics Mathematical Structures CFT

I began my career in science as an undergraduate studying physics and mathematics at the University of Michigan. Upon graduation, I took up a Marshall Scholarship to pursue a degree in Mathematics at Cambridge University before starting doctoral work at Princeton University, where I earned my PhD in 2011 under the supervision of Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study, writing a thesis on Quantum Field Theory and the Analytic S-Matrix.

After Princeton, I was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, where I spent several years working on what would become the book, Grassmannian Geometry of Scattering Amplitudes, published by Cambridge University Press.

I moved to Copenhagen in 2014 to join the faculty at the Niels Bohr International Academy of the University of Copenhagen, where I still maintain an affiliation. While in Copenhagen, my work earned support from the Villum Foundation and the European Research Council, allowing me to recruit and collaborate with a number of outstanding researchers (see below).

I took up my current position at Penn State in 2020, and am looking forward to many exciting years here.

ORCID: 0000-0002-3340-5667

Publications
  1. Jacob Bourjaily, Nikhil Kalyanapuram, Cameron Langer, Kokkimidis Patatoukos, Marcus Spradlin “Elliptic, Yangian-Invariant “Leading Singularity”.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 126 20 (2021) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.201601
  2. Jacob Bourjaily, Enrico Herrmann, Cameron Langer, Andrew McLeod, Jaroslav Trnka “All-Multiplicity Nonplanar Amplitude Integrands in Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory at Two Loops.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 124 11 (2020) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.111603
  3. Jacob Bourjaily, Enrico Herrmann, Cameron Langer, Jaroslav Trnka “Building Bases of Loop Integrands.” JHEP 11 (2020) doi:10.1007/JHEP11(2020)116
  4. Jacob Bourjaily, Andrew McLeod, Matt Hippel, Matthias Wilhelm “A (Bounded) Bestiary of Feynman Integral Calabi-Yau Geometries.” Phys. Rev. Lett. 122 3 (2019) doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.031601
  5. Nima Arkani-Hamed, Jacob Bourjaily, Freddy Cachazo, Alexander Goncharov, Alexander Postnikov, Jaroslav Trnka “Grassmannian Geometry of Scattering Amplitudes.” (2016) doi:10.1017/CBO9781316091548
  6. Jacob Bourjaily, Paul Heslop, Vuong-Viet Tran “Amplitudes and Correlators to Ten Loops Using Simple, Graphical Bootstraps.” JHEP 11 (2016) doi:10.1007/JHEP11(2016)125
  7. Jacob Bourjaily, Simon Caron-Huot, Jaroslav Trnka “Dual-Conformal Regularization of Infrared Loop Divergences and the Chiral Box Expansion.” JHEP 01 (2015) doi:10.1007/JHEP01(2015)001
  8. Jacob Bourjaily, Jaroslav Trnka “Local Integrand Representations of All Two-Loop Amplitudes in Planar SYM.” JHEP 08 (2015) doi:10.1007/JHEP08(2015)119

Jacob Bourjaily's research group

Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Michael Plesser Michael Plesser Graduate Student Math, Physics mkp5771@psu.edu – 204B Osmond Laboratory CFT, IGC
Philip Velie Philip Velie Graduate Student Physics pkv5088@psu.edu n/a 114 Osmond Laboratory CFT Mathematical Structures
Yaqi Zhang Yaqi Zhang Graduate Student Physics yjz5289@psu.edu – na Whitmore Laboratory CFT Mathematical Structures

Jacob Bourjaily's former group members

Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Kokkimidis Patatoukos Kokkimidis Patatoukos Graduate Student Physics kzp326@psu.edu 814 699 1747 005 Osmond Laboratory CFT Mathematical Structures
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.