Speaker: Julian Adamek (ICS, Zurich)
Title: General Relativistic N-body Simulations for Cosmology
Abstract:
As large astronomical surveys are entering the era of "big data" where their statistical power can tease out subtle effects from the observed distribution of galaxies, the deformations of spacetime geometry will soon become a precious signal that can tell us how gravity operates on the largest scales we are able to probe. This is of great importance because cosmologists are struggling to grasp what causes the Universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. If it is, as many speculate, due to the presence of "dark energy," we need robust numerical models for the non-linear regime of cosmological structure formation. I will present a framework that uses weak-field general relativity and can therefore consistently accommodate generic extensions to the Lambda-cold-dark-matter baseline model of cosmology. It provides a clean approach for testing gravity and will advance our understanding of the phenomenology of dark energy.