Rate My Professor Marek Krasnansky

Dr. Marek Krasnansky serves as Associate Professor of Physics in the Department of Chemistry and Physics, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, at West Virginia State University, a position he has held since 2007. He obtained his Mgr. degree from Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, and earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Connecticut in January 2007. His dissertation, "Quantum gauge field theory," addressed canonical quantization of gauge theories in the spatial axial gauge, restoring rotational symmetry for nonabelian theories with gauge fixing A_3^a = 0, and similarities to gauge invariant quantities in the Weyl gauge. It further developed integration-by-parts rules for Feynman diagrams with massive scalar propagators in background electromagnetic fields, providing a diagrammatic interpretation of mass renormalization in the two-loop scalar QED Heisenberg-Euler effective action. For constant backgrounds, the fully renormalized effective action was derived without evaluating integrals or specifying propagators. Special cases like self-dual fields reduced the two-loop action to one-loop quantities using recursion relations, applicable in arbitrary even dimensions.

Dr. Krasnansky's research interests encompass simple models quantized on the light front, quantum chromodynamics in the spatial axial gauge, and quantum electrodynamics effective action in a background field. Key publications include his dissertation and the co-authored paper "Background field integration-by-parts and the connection between one-loop and two-loop Heisenberg-Euler effective actions" with Gerald V. Dunne, published in the Journal of High Energy Physics (2006, 04:020). At West Virginia State University, located in 319 Hamblin Hall, he advises the S.P.A.C.E. Club and leads undergraduate students in NASA RockSat-X projects. In 2017, student payloads reached 94 miles altitude, measuring radiation, high-energy particles, acceleration, rotation, Earth's magnetic field, and ozone. In 2019, five students under his supervision launched experiments on August 12 from NASA Wallops Flight Facility to 96 miles, successfully recovering data. He co-presented on these suborbital payloads at the 2019 Appalachian Section Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers, fostering practical research skills in space instrumentation among students.