WFIRST Science Investigation Team "Cosmology with the High Latitude Survey" Annual Report 2017
Abstract
Cosmic acceleration is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. Testing and distinguishing among possible explanations requires cosmological measurements of extremely high precision probing the full history of cosmic expansion and structure growth and, ideally, compare and contrast matter and relativistic tracers of the gravity potential. This program is one of the defining objectives of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), as set forth in the New Worlds, New Horizons report (NWNH) in 2010. The WFIRST mission has the ability to improve these measurements by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to the current state of the art, while simultaneously extending their redshift grasp, greatly improving control of systematic effects, and taking a unified approach to multiple probes that provide complementary physical information and cross-checks of cosmological results. We describe in this annual report the activities of the Science Investigation Team (SIT) "Cosmology with the High Latitude Survey (HLS)" during the year 2017. This team was selected by NASA in December 2015 in order to address the stringent challenges of the WFIRST dark energy (DE) program through the Project's formulation phase. This SIT has elected to jointly address Galaxy Redshift Survey, Weak Lensing and Cluster Growth and thus fully embrace the fact that the imaging and spectroscopic elements of the HLS will be realized as an integrated observing program, and they jointly impose requirements on performance and operations. WFIRST is designed to be able to deliver a definitive result on the origin of cosmic acceleration. It is not optimized for Figure of Merit sensitivity but for control of systematic uncertainties and for having multiple techniques each with multiple cross-checks. Our SIT work focuses on understanding the potential systematics in the WFIRST DE measurements.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.1804.03628,
title = {WFIRST Science Investigation Team "Cosmology with the High Latitude Survey" Annual Report 2017},
author = {Olivier Doré and Christopher Hirata and Yun Wang and David Weinberg and Ivano Baronchelli and Andrew Benson and Peter Capak and Ami Choi and Tim Eifler and Shoubaneh Hemmati and Shirley Ho and Albert Izard and Bhuvnesh Jain and Mike Jarvis and Alina Kiessling and Elisabeth Krause and Elena Massara and Dan Masters and Alex Merson and Hironao Miyatake and Andres Plazas Malagon and Rachel Mandelbaum and Lado Samushia and Chaz Shapiro and Melanie Simet and David Spergel and Harry Teplitz and Michael Troxel and Rachel Bean and James Colbert and Chen He Heinrich and Katrin Heitmann and George Helou and Michael Hudson and Eric Huff and Alexie Leauthaud and Niall MacCrann and Nikhil Padmanabhan and Alice Pisani and Jason Rhodes and Eduardo Rozo and Mike Seiffert and Kendrick Smith and Masahiro Takada and Anja von der Linden and Robert Lupton and Naoki Yoshida and Hao-Yi Wu and Ying Zu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03628},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
This document is an annual report. A higher version of this document can be found here (http://www.wfirst-hls-cosmology.org/products/). This document does not constitute an official WFIRST Project document