Descrizione del progetto
Comprendere l’Universo con indagini sulla galassia
Possiamo utilizzare la distribuzione delle galassie per testare le leggi che governano il nostro Universo. La nostra comprensione dell’Universo primordiale si basa sulla presenza di un nuovo campo che ha causato l’espansione rapida dell’Universo (inflazione). Osserviamo anche un’espansione accelerata dell’attuale Universo soprannominata energia oscura. Queste nuove forze sconosciute che governano l’Universo primordiale e tardivo sono tra i più grandi enigmi della fisica contemporanea. I moderni set di dati cosmologici ci consentono di esplorare queste forze fondamentali e di confrontare i modelli teorici con i dati. Il progetto FutureLSS, finanziato dall’UE, supporta la ricerca sulla natura di campo di inflazione, materia oscura ed energia oscura con i dati degli esperimenti DESI ed Euclide. Svilupperà nuovi stimatori statistici e tecniche di modellizzazione all’avanguardia nel tentativo di ottenere nuove intuizioni sulla cosmologia, con collegamenti significativi con le particelle e la fisica delle alte energie.
Obiettivo
The last 30 years have been a golden era of cosmological discoveries, which revolutionized our understanding of the physical concepts, which govern our Universe. New discoveries indicate that the beginning of our Universe might have been dominated by the inflaton field, which decayed during the first second of the Universe’s existence, introducing tiny ripples in the matter distribution, which ultimately sourced later galaxy formation. The future of our Universe is dominated by dark energy, which causes the current Universe to accelerate in its expansion. Both inflation and dark energy are theoretical constructs, which help to explain current observational results, but their fundamental role in physics is not yet understood.
The distribution of galaxies in the Universe encodes an enormous amount of information, which holds the key to unravel new fundamental concepts of nature. The main goal of this proposal is to use galaxy surveys to uncover convincing evidence for the inflationary scenario and to reveal clues that will help to determine the nature of dark energy.
My team will make use of data from the DESI and Euclid experiments, a new generation of galaxy surveys, which will provide datasets more than an order of magnitude larger than what is available today, thus allowing a decisive step forward with an exciting discovery potential. Such measurements will face significant challenges in systematics control, non-linear modeling, and computational limitations. In this proposal, I will outline my plan to develop new statistical estimators, apply cutting-edge modeling techniques, and access new observables to constrain cosmological models. This project will produce results going beyond cosmology, impacting particle- as well as high energy physics. With DESI starting in late 2019 and Euclid in 2021 this work is timely and my experience in the clustering analysis with such datasets puts me in a unique position to lead the cosmological exploitation of these experiments.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
EH8 9YL Edinburgh
Regno Unito