SB/BNL Joint Cosmo seminar (at Stony Brook): Tim Eifler, JPL: Constraining Fundamental Physics with Cosmological Data Sets

Wednesday 8 Feb 2017, 13:30 → 14:30 US/Eastern

Universe

The tightest constraints on fundamental physics questions, such as cosmic acceleration, massive neutrinos, and tests of gravity, will be obtained through a combination of multiple cosmological probes that are complementary in terms of information content and sensitivity to systematic uncertainties. Several future experiments are preparing for such analyses that include weak gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering, CMB temperature/polarization, CMB lensing, galaxy clusters and cross-correlations thereof.  In this talk I will focus on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), and their synergies with other experiments, e.g. the future CMB-Stage4 (CMB-S4) mission. I will detail recent progress and remaining challenges in developing multi-probe analysis strategies with multiple data sets and show results from simulated likelihood analyses for LSST, WFIRST and CMB-S4. I will conclude with more speculative ideas and mission concepts: 1) "Kinematic Lensing", which combines spectroscopic and imaging information to resolve some of the most prominent sources of statistical and systematical uncertainties of traditional weak lensing and 2) the ongoing "SuperBIT" mission, which aims for near-space imaging quality from a 100 day balloon flight at a fraction of the cost of space missions.