CosmosClub: Santiago Casas (09/07/2018)

Date: July 9th 2018

Speaker: Santiago Casas (CEA Saclay)

Title: Dark Energy with Euclid


Euclid is an ESA medium-class mission expected to launch in 2020 that will map the geometry of the Universe by imaging 10^9 galaxies and measuring 10^7 galaxy redshifts in 15000 square degrees of the sky. This will provide us detailed information about the accelerated expansion, the evolution of large-scale structure and the matter-energy content of the Universe up to a redshift of about z≈2.
In this talk, I will review how the main probes of Euclid, namely galaxy clustering and weak lensing, will be able to constrain theories beyond the standard cosmological ΛCDM model and how we will be able to pin down the equation of state of dark energy with about 1% precision. Galaxy clustering measures mainly the movement of tracers along geodesics, while weak lensing is an almost direct mapping of the gravitational potentials at large scales. Using both of these observables, we can obtain valuable information about the growth of perturbations and the geometrical quantities of the Universe and therefore constrain the properties of General Relativity. Since the measurements of Euclid will also give insights on the properties of dark matter and neutrinos at cosmological scales, I will also show how we can measure non-standard couplings between matter species and dark energy and how we can give tight constraints on many alternative theories of gravity.