Graduate school seminar: Satya A. Gontcho - DESI shakes up the dark Universe

Speaker: Satya A. Gontcho, University of Virginia, USA

Title: DESI shakes up the dark Universe

Abstract

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is building the largest 3D map of our universe to measure its expansion history over the past 11 billion years and investigates cosmology’s greatest enigma: the nature of the dark energy. The DESI first-year BAO results reveal intriguing evidence suggesting dark energy may evolve over time. By analyzing both BAO signatures and large-scale structure clustering across multiple scales, DESI provides new insights into fundamental cosmological puzzles, including constraints on neutrino properties and tests of alternative gravitational theories. In this colloquium, I will give an overview of the DESI experiment, describe the year-1 cosmology results and their implication, and present the most recent upgrades using BAO information from the year-3 DESI data.