The future of dark energy measurements – Dragan Huterer

Date: Tue. February 1st, 2005, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller 221

Evidence for the existence of some form of dark energy — a smooth component that causes the accelerated expansion of the universe and contributes about 70% of the total energy density — is by now very solid. However, despite thousands of published papers on the topic essentially no progress has been made in understanding its nature and the underlying physical mechanism. In this talk I describe the prospects of several methods to measure the macroscopic properties of dark energy within the next decade. In addition to type Ia supernovae, these include weak and strong gravitational lensing, number counts of clusters of galaxies, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies. I particularly concentrate on weak gravitational lensing, describing the recent progress and challenges in controlling the systematic errors. Considering the expected sensitivity of space-based experiments that will perform these measurements, I comment on the prospects for the overall advancement of our understanding of dark energy.