Gil Holder, University of Illinois Urbana - Champagne

University of Arizona, Theoretical Astrophysics Program (TAP) Colloquia Series
TITLE:
New views of structure in the universe: galaxies, high-energy neutrinos, and the CMB
ABSTRACT:
I will talk about several streams of ongoing research involving new views of large-scale
structure using different N-point correlations: searching for 2-pt correlations between high-energy
neutrinos and galaxies; using 3-pt functions in galaxy catalogs as probes of gravitational
lensing and other line-of-sight effects; and using a 4-pt function of the CMB as a probe of
re-ionization.
BIO:
Gilbert Holder, the Brand and Monica Fortner Endowed Chair in Theoretical Astrophysics at the University
of Illinois, is a theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist who seeks to understand how the complex universe
we see today--full of galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, and planets--evolved from a nearly uniform state having
density fluctuations of a few parts per million 300,000 years after the big bang. Professor Holder has worked
on a wide range of topics--from the early universe, to the cosmic microwave background, to gravitational
lensing, to black holes, to our solar system. He has developed theoretical methods and tools to investigate
these astronomical objects, enabling important constraints on the properties of dark matter and dark energy.
Professor Holder received his BSc (1994) in astrophysics and MSc (1996) in physics from Queen's University in
Kingston, Ontario, before obtaining his PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago in
2001. His graduate work on the possibility of discovering new galaxy clusters through their imprints in the
cosmic microwave background was a key science motivation for a new generation of large mm-wave survey
experiments.
After obtaining his doctorate, Professor Holder was a Keck Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study
(Princeton, New Jersey). Following a short stint as a senior research associate at the Canadian Institute for
Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Professor Holder was appointed the Canada Research Chair in Cosmological
Astrophysics at McGill University in Montreal in 2005. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in 2016 as a professor of Physics and of Astronomy and is a faculty affiliate at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications. He is also a senior fellow in the Cosmology and Gravity Program of the
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Professor Holder is currently working on developing theoretical models of the fine-scale structure and
polarization of the cosmic microwave background to inform experiments such as the South Pole Telescope,
a 10-m telescope at the geographic South Pole that observes mm-wave radiation. As part of this project, he
has developed techniques to map out dark matter on the largest scales, approaching the cosmic horizon, using
gravitational lensing. He is also a member of a team of researchers that aims to map dark matter on the smallest
resolvable scales to shed new light on the nature of dark matter; this team recently revealed the existence of
a dwarf "dark galaxy" nearly 4 billion light-years from Earth.