Precision cosmology from early and late-time surveys.

The cosmological quest is mainly fed by the curiosity to know how things started and evolved in time, which particular process led to the objects we see in the sky (e.g., galaxies and clusters of galaxies), where they come from and why they are moving away from us.

A key aspect of physics of the early Universe is the theory and the observation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) temperature fluctuations and polarisation. The use of the CMB to study the particle and energy content of the Universe as well as its evolution is a remarkable success of modern cosmology.
The CMB is the most ancient light we can observe in the Universe. It was born in the early Universe a few seconds after the Big Bang and thermalised in the primordial 'cosmic soup' where the high Universe temperature coupled light together with other particles. It then decoupled and was released when the Universe cooled down and the first light elements started to form (e.g., hydrogen and helium), leaving CMB photons free to escape. The CMB then provides us with a snapshot and unique view of the transparent Universe. It has been free to travel from the decoupling moment to today and it reaches us as a faint radiation with microwave wavelengths. The way it propagates and its statistical properties inform us about the physics of the early Universe (looking back in time from decoupling) and describes its particle/energy content and evolution (looking forward in time from decoupling). The statistics of the CMB temperature variations have now been measured with extreme precision over a broad range of scales, leading to a concordance standard model of cosmology. However, the standard cosmological model arising today relies on observational evidence for components and processes with unknown theoretical interpretation. We measure that 95% of the Universe is dominated by 'dark' components but we don't know yet what their nature is. We call 'dark matter' the component responsible for the galaxies formation and 'dark energy' the force opposing gravity and driving the Universe in an accelerating expansion, all this assuming that the laws of gravity are correct on all scales. We also need to invoke a super-luminal expansion in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang to account for the homogeneity of the Universe on cosmic scales and its flatness. In the last ten years CMB data has become the most competitive and tantalising source of information to address these open theoretical issues.

My project relies on two kinds of observations complementing current data in the next decade: improved measurement of CMB polarisation and the measurement of galaxies statistics and distribution on the largest physical scales (e.g., galaxy clusters, voids, filaments, bubbles) over a broad cosmic epoch.
At the end of 2013 and early 2014 the new measurements of CMB polarisation from gound-based experiments have kicked off a new era in CMB physics. CMB polarisation will inform our understanding of the brief expansion phase of the early Universe (called cosmic inflation), probing high energy scales not testable in laboratories, and will map the gravitational potential field defining the geometry, evolution and content of the Universe. CMB polarisation is particularly effective for studying the masses of primordial neutrinos, still unmeasured today.
Current and future probes of the Universe large-scale structure, via galaxy surveys, will be instead effective in characterising the dark sector and testing the gravity laws on cosmic scales.
The combination of CMB and galaxy surveys will increase the fidelity of the cosmological reconstructions, reducing systematics and probing many cosmic epochs (the CMB gives us a snapshot of a ~400,000 years old Universe while galaxy surveys probe the last 10 billion years).