Duke Physics Colloquium: Cosmology with weak gravitational lensing: challenges and opportunities

"Cosmology with weak gravitational lensing: challenges and opportunities" - 69% of the energy density of the Universe today is in the form of a mysterious dark energy component which seems to be driving its accelerated expansion. To elucidate the nature of this component, and to assess whether it is compatible with General Relativity, a next generation of experiments is at our doorstep. These experiments use weak distortions of galaxy shapes (gravitational lensing) as their main probe, and will soon reach an unprecedented high-precision regime. In such regime, accurate modeling of the large-scale structure of the Universe becomes crucial to realize the goal of obtaining unbiased constraints on the cosmological model. I will describe efforts to build and test models of the large-scale structure using a combination of analytical theory, cosmological simulations and existing observational data sets. In particular, I will demonstrate that the incidence of galaxy formation on our interpretation of gravitational lensing observables is significant. Effects such as the impact of... Read more on the Physics website. Faculty host: Chris Walter | Refreshments will be available before the event in room 128.