Precision Cosmology with Galaxy and Microwave Background surveys

ended

Over the last 15 years, observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, together with galaxy surveys, have established with great precision the pillars of the current concordance ΛCDM model of cosmology. This model requires a very early epoch of accelerated expansion referred to as inflation, during which quantum mechanical density fluctuations generated the seeds for the evolution of the large scale structures (LSS) we observe today. These grew under gravitational instability induced by the presence of dark matter, an hypothetical type of matter which has mass but interacts only gravitationally with standard matter. This process converted the primordial inflationary perturbations into clumpy million light-year sized clusters and galaxies. A few billion years ago, however, we entered a new era of accelerated expansion driven by yet another component permeating the universe: the dark energy. The dark matter, dark energy and inflation concepts parametrize, and they do so remarkably well, our lack of knowledge about the universe, without affecting our capability of making observable prediction on cosmological scales. Nevertheless, from the point of view of fundamental physics, they represent one of the biggest unknowns to pin down. The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics cannot easily accommodate the existence of the dark components or explain the inflationary mechanism, which occurred at energy scales well above the ones that can ever be tested in a laboratory. The goal of this project is to provide new insight into our understanding of the universe using observations of the reconstructed matter distribution in the universe in different wavelengths and analyze these data jointly to tackle few of the fundamental open questions in cosmology: the determination of the physics of the inflationary mechanism, the measurement of neutrino masses, the nature of dark matter, the nature and properties of dark energy, and the nature of the gravitational force.