Science of SLAC | A Deep Look for Dark Energy: Science and Discovery with the LSST

Today we understand matter in a comprehensive way: molecules made of atoms, atoms made of protons, neutrons and electrons, protons and neutrons made of quarks and gluons, and quarks and leptons found in three generations. But normal matter makes up only 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe. Much of the rest consists of an energy associated with space itself, known as dark energy, that cannot be seen directly and whose nature remains largely unknown. To learn more we must study the portion of the universe we can see – stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters – and we must observe as much of the universe as possible, looking deeply into the past at galaxies billions of light years away.

This lecture focuses on the science of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction and an important part of that quest. From a mountaintop in Chile, it aims to observe billions of stars and galaxies, uncover the nature of dark energy and discover new phenomena in the night sky. SLAC is leading the construction of the LSST camera. The size of a small car and weighing 3 tons, it will be the largest digital camera ever built.

Aaron Roodman is a professor of particle physics and astrophysics whose research focuses on observational cosmology. He did his undergraduate work at Caltech, and received a PhD from the University of Chicago working on the CDF experiment at Fermilab. He stayed at Chicago as a postdoc to study matter-antimatter asymmetries in neutral kaons. Roodman came to SLAC in 1998 as a junior faculty member to continue his study of asymmetries with the BaBar experiment at the PEP-II B factory. After 20 years of wondering what happened to all the antimatter in the universe, he decided to switch to exploring why most of the universe isn’t matter at all, but dark matter and dark energy. Roodman is working on the currently running Dark Energy Survey as well as playing a major role in the construction of the camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Видео Science of SLAC | A Deep Look for Dark Energy: Science and Discovery with the LSST канала SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory