Probing Fundamental Physics with Cosmological Observations

Prof Uros Seljak
Universität Zürich and
University of California at Berkeley

3 April 2013 (Wednesday)
1:30 - 3:00 pm
Chen Kuan Cheng Forum (LT-H), HKUST

Abstract:

The speaker will review the promise of cosmological observations to determine questions of fundamental significance such as inflation, neutrino mass, dark matter and dark energy. He will discuss the current understanding of nonlinear evolution of large scale structure, including the connection between the galaxies and the dark matter clustering, focusing on weak lensing, galaxy clustering and redshift space distortions.

About the speaker

Prof Uros Seljak received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He was a Smithsonian Fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1995 to 1998. Prior to joining the University of California at Berkeley in 2008, he taught at Princeton University and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. He is Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. He also holds a joint appointment with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also Professor of Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Zürich.

Prof Seljak’s research interests focus on theoretical, observational and numerical astrophysics and cosmology, which include large scale structure of the universe, cosmic microwave background, dark matter and dark energy and cosmological simulations.

Prof Seljak is the recipient of the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Helen B. Warner award of American Astronomical Society and the CAREER award by the US National Science Foundation.