First data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

by Andreu Font-Ribera (IFAE)

Wednesday 7 Jul 2021, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Virtual Seminar Room (IFAE)

Some of the open questions in fundamental physics can be addressed by looking at the distribution of matter in the Universe as a function of scale and time (or redshift). We can study the nature of dark energy, causing the accelerated expansion of the Universe. We can measure the sum of the neutrino masses, and potentially determine their hierarchy. We can test the standard model at energies higher that those accessible at the laboratory, by studying the primordial density perturbations. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has just started a 5-years program to generate the largest and most accurate 3D map of the distribution of galaxies and quasars. By measuring the statistical properties of these catalogs, DESI will be able to reconstruct the expansion history of the Universe over the last 11 billion years, while making precise measurements of the growth of structure. In this presentation, I will give an overview of DESI and highlight some of the key results that we expect to obtain in the next few years.