DR. MANDEEP GILL

In this seminar, the speaker will highlight the recent advances in cosmological constraints on LCDM and Modified Gravity models from analysis of the ~ 150 sq. degree science verification data from the early running of Dark Energy Survey (DES), and give projections for the full 5 year dataset. He will then discuss the capabilities of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) for constraining further the model parameter space for dark energy, and give some idea of the challenges involved in making maximal use of the dataset from this 'ultimate survey' telescope, such as one the speaker is personally involved in, which is dealing with the issue of overlapping background galaxy images, which will occur for over half of the galaxies imaged, far greater than in any large survey ever done. In the end, if we can get control of these systematics, we will in 10 - 15 years, have constraints down to the sub-percent level -- or up to 2 orders of magnitude better than we currently have -- about whether dark energy still behaves exactly like Einstein's cosmological constant, or is something mysteriously different from that.