Hy Trac

Assistant Professor, Physics

Education

Ph.D., University of Toronto

Research

I am a theoretical and computational cosmologist and am interested in cosmic evolution and structure formation. My research often utilizes numerical simulations run on supercomputers. I develop and apply N-body, hydrodynamic, and radiative transfer codes to simulate how structures form and evolve in the expanding Universe. I am interested in complex problems involving the gas, stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters that we observe directly with modern telescopes. I am actively working on understanding how the first generation of stars and galaxies reionized the Universe. As a member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) project, I work on discovering and interpreting massive galaxy clusters. As a member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS III) project, I work on using quasars as background sources to study the intervening intergalactic gas.

Selected Publications

• Hy Trac, Paul Bode, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Templates for the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich angular power spectrum, The Astrophysical Journal 727, 94 (2011)
• HY Trac, Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Computer Simulations of Cosmic Reionization, Advanced Science Letters 4, 228 (2011)
• J. Dunkley et al., The Atacama cosmology telescope: cosmological parameters from the 2008 power spectrum, The Astrophysical Journal 739, 52 (2011)
• Neelima Sehgal et al., The Atacama cosmology telescope: cosmology from galaxy clusters detected via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, The Astrophysical Journal 732, 44 (2011)
• Hy Trac, Renyue Cen, Abraham Loeb, Imprint of Inhomogeneous Hydrogen Reionization on the Temperature Distribution of the Intergalactic Medium, The Astrophysical Journal 689, L81 (2008)
• Hy Trac, Renyue Cen, Radiative Transfer Simulations of Cosmic Reionization. I. Methodology and Initial Results, The Astrophysical Journal 671, 1 (2007)
• Hy Trac, Ue-Li Pen, Out-of-core hydrodynamic simulations for cosmological applications, New Astronomy 11, 273 (2006)
• Hy Trac, A moving frame algorithm for high Mach number hydrodynamics, New Astronomy 9, 443 (2004)