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OATS-UNI/TS SEMINAR
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Speaker: Alessandra Silvestri (SISSA, Trieste)

Title: Cosmological Tests of General Relativity
Date: Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
Time: 11:30
Venue: Villa Bazzoni
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Abstract Future cosmological surveys, combining galaxy counts and weak lensing measurements, will map the evolution of matter perturbations and gravitational potentials from the matter dominated epoch until today. In addition to tightening the constraints on allowed expansion histories, the combination of these measurements will test the relationships between matter overdensities, local curvature, and the Newtonian potential. These relation- ships can be modified in alternative theories of gravity and by exotic forms of dark energy. I will discuss theoretical issues involved in finding an optimal framework to study deviations from GR on cosmological scales and introduce the application of a Principal Component Analysis to the evolution of cosmo- logical perturbations. The latter allows us to study in a model-independent way the potential of upcoming and future tomographic surveys, such as DES and LSST, to detect departures from the growth of perturbations expected within General Relativity with a cosmological constant.
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Contact: Matteo Viel (OATS)