Optimising dark energy constraints from Euclid with end-to-end simulations of the spectroscopic sample

Representative image for thesis Tutors: Benjamin Granett, E. Branchini (DIFI)
Lasting: 3 years. PhD thesis.

The ESA Euclid mission planned to launch in 2024 is a state-of-the-art cosmological observatory that is designed to answer fundamental questions about the origin of the accelerated expansion of the Universe, the nature of dark energy and the validity of General Relativity on cosmological scales. It will couple an efficient survey strategy with a novel spectroscopic technique to map the spatial distribution of tens of millions H-alpha emission line galaxies from redshift 0.9 to 1.8. To extract the cosmological signal it will be necessary to model the complex selection function of this survey with high accuracy to account for incompleteness and for the presence of interloper galaxies.
The goal of this project is to accurately evaluate and possibly minimize the impact of these effects and to forecast their impact on the galaxy clustering statistics that we use to trace the expansion history of the Universe and the evolution of its cosmic structures.

The interested student will use realistic mock catalogs mimicking the Euclid spectroscopic data and the data analysis pipeline developed by our team to assess the impact of selection effects on the estimate of the fundamental cosmological parameters to maximize the scientific exploitation of the Euclid data.

The student will join the international Euclid Consortium and participate in its activities. This project will be integrated in and expand the ongoing effort of the Euclid Genova Team (Prof. S. Tosi and Dott. I. Risso at DIFI and Dr. S. Davini at INFN-Genova) and will be supervised by Dr. B. Granett (INAF OA Brera-Merate) and by Prof. E. Branchini (DIFI).