Work
White has worked primarily on the formation of structure in the Universe. He is known for his contributions to our understanding of galaxy formation and for his role in helping to establish the viability of the current standard model for the evolution of cosmic structure, the so-called ΛCDM model.
Already at the time of his doctoral work he studied the influence of Dark Matter on the growth of structure and in 1978 he and Martin Rees argued that the properties of galaxies can be understood if they form by condensation of gas at the centres of extended dark matter halos.
In later years White developed computer models which allowed the growth of galaxies and galaxy clustering to be simulated directly in order to allow quantitative comparison of theoretical models with astronomical observations. His work with Marc Davis, George Efstathiou and Carlos Frenk was particularly influential in establishing that a universe dominated by Cold Dark Matter could produce large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution which closely resembles that observed. A recent large project has been the Millennium Simulation, carried out in Garching as part of the work of a large international collaboration, the Virgo Consortium. This simulation followed the formation of more than 2,000,000 galaxies throughout a cubic region more than 2 billion light-years on a side.
Further highly cited work by White has addressed issues of stellar dynamics, of the detailed structure of galaxies and their dark halos, of the processes controlling galaxy formation, of the structure and evolution of galaxy clusters, and of the statistics of galaxy clustering. Particularly influential papers were those with Julio Navarro and Carlos Frenk on the "universal" structure of dark matter halos.
White is currently one of the most highly cited of all astrophysicists. His more than 300 publications in the refereed professional literature have been cited more than 70,000 times by other scientists (status mid-2013).
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