ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM - MARCH 28, 2006

Gary Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania

Handicapping the Dark Energy Derby

Many different approaches and projects have been proposed to seek the cause of the acceleration of the Hubble expansion. I will describe a new formalism for forecasting the performance of one of these methods, weak gravitational lensing, which unifies the treatment of statistical, systematic, and theory uncertainties. Then I will compare the dark-energy constraints from different methods, such as high-redshift supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, and cluster counting, and see how these might combine to improve our future understanding of the acceleration phenomenon.