Vojtěch Witzany,

personal webpage

Hello, my name is Vojtěch Witzany and I am a physicist working on the theory and phenomenology of black holes. Currently (from Jan 2023), I am a Primus group leader at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Charles University in Prague.  Please enjoy the assortment of links and trivia related to my person below.

Research

Roughly speaking, much of my research could be summarized as attempting to answer questions such as "How do things behave near black holes? How do they move? How do they evolve?" and, to some degree also "How can we observe all of that?". What these "things" are can vary quite a bit, though. They can be speckles of dust, other black holes, neutron stars, "ordinary" stars, or even clouds of magnetized plasma orbiting the black holes in accretion disks.  The fields of the black holes in which the dynamics are happening can be isolated, rotating, non-rotating, but they can also be perturbed by the presence of matter. How we observe it may range from radio dishes on Earth to gravitational-wave detectors and X-ray telescopes in space. To answer all of these questions, I use advanced mathematical techniques and numerical simulations. 

Group

 I have been awarded the Primus fellowship by Charles U. in Prague, which allowed me to hire a small team of two postdocs and one PhD student starting from 2023. The team members are:

- Lukáš Polcar (postdoc, started August 2023) 

- Viktor Skoupý (postdoc, started October 2023) 

- Álvaro Rafael Martínez Gómez (PhD student, started October 2023)



Study/career track

Outreach writing

I like talking about science from a generalist point of view. I think it brings something to the people who listen but also forces me to take on fresh perspectives. 

For a period of time I contributed regularly to Physics Stackexchange (see my profile), I also semi-regularly write popular science articles for the Czech magazine Respekt on various topics:

My other miscellaneous outreach writing includes:

Scientific publications

You will find my most recent publications by searching me on ArXiv or checking my InspireHEP or Google Scholar profiles.

Here is a list updated in June 2024 (only my 16 published peer-reviewed works are listed in reverse chronological order, conference proceedings and preprints are left out): 

Science with a small two-band UV-photometry mission III: Active Galactic Nuclei and nuclear transients.
Space Sci. Rev., Volume 220, Issue 3, article id.29 arXiv:2306.15082
Description: A science white paper about the upcoming Czech space-based UV telescope QUVIK. This paper focuses on transients such as various types of eruptions that one might observe in the centers of galaxies with this telescope.