Related papers: WFIRST: The Essential Cosmology Space Observatory …
For physicists, recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology present exciting challenges. We are conducting "experiments" in energy regimes some of which will be probed by accelerators in the near future, and others which are…
The discovery of cosmic acceleration has stimulated theorists to consider dark energy or modifications to Einstein's General Relativity as possible explanations. The last decade has seen advances in theories that go beyond smooth dark…
The expansion of the observed universe appears to be accelerating. A simple explanation of this phenomenon is provided by the non-vanishing of the cosmological constant in the Einstein equations. Arguments are commonly presented to the…
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a 2.4m space telescope with a 0.281 deg^2 field of view for near-IR imaging and slitless spectroscopy and a coronagraph designed for > 10^8 starlight suppresion. As background information…
The observational evidence for the recent acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete (or possibly incorrect) and that new physics is out there, waiting to be…
Associated with the cosmic acceleration are the old and new cosmological constant problems, recently put into the more general context of the dark energy problem. In broad terms, the old problem is related to an unexpected order of…
A central theme in cosmology is the perplexing fact that the Universe is undergoing an accelerating expansion. The latter, one of the most important and challenging current problems in cosmology, represents a new imbalance in the governing…
The discovery of dark energy (DE) as the physical cause for the accelerated expansion of the Universe is the most remarkable experimental finding of modern cosmology. However, it leads to insurmountable theoretical difficulties from the…
The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and…
The Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) was the highest ranked large space-based mission of the 2010 New Worlds, New Horizons decadal survey. It is now a NASA mission in formulation with a planned launch in the mid-2020s. A…
In 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Somehow, something must have made gravity repulsive on cosmological scales. This something was called dark energy; it is described by Einstein's cosmological…
Understanding the Universe's origins and evolution remains one of the most fundamental challenges in modern cosmology. This white paper explores three key science priorities in this field: unravelling the physics of cosmic inflation,…
The discovery that we live in an accelerating universe changed drastically the paradigm of physics and introduced the concept of \textit{dark energy}. In this work, we present a brief historical description of the main events related to the…
The physics community has adopted the principle that when new experimental data appears, physicists should first try to explain it based on existing science. Only if all such attempts fail can new exotic explanations be brought in. However,…
Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…
WFIRST is the highest priority space mission of the Decadal review, however, it is unlikely to begin in this decade primarily due to a anticipated NASA budget that is unlikely to have sufficient resources to fund such a mission. For this…
Recent cosmological and astrophysical observations point out that the Universe is in accelerating expansion and filled up with non-luminous matter. In order to explain the observed large scale structures and this accelerating behavior one…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
The most important problem in fundamental physics is the description of the contents of the Universe. Today, we know that 95% thereof is totally unknown. Two thirds of that amount is the mysterious Dark Energy described in an interesting…
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…