Speaker
Description
The distribution of galaxies on large scales is a sensitive probe of cosmological physics. In particular, the structure of this distribution depends on properties of dark matter and the dynamics of the early universe. Understanding this dependence, however, is a challenging task because the observed galaxy distribution is modulated by a variety of non-linear effects. I will present theoretical tools that have allowed for a systematic analytic description of these effects. These tools play a central role in a new program of extracting cosmological information from galaxy surveys. I will share some results of this program from my independent analysis of the public data from the Baryon acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. These results include the measurement of the Hubble constant as well as constraints on new physics and the early Universe.