Einstein first correctly predicted how mass deflects light. Galaxy clusters, comprising of up to hundreds of galaxies all residing in a still larger dark...
Nov7
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey (DESI) and Beyond
David Schlegel, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
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The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is mapping the sky with a 5000-fiber robotic focal plane and 10 optical spectrographs. I will describe the challenges in construction, installation, commissioning, operations, and data reduction. The 13 million galaxies mapped in the first year already promises to improve our understanding of cosmic expansion and dark energy.
Future upgrades of the DESI instrument will enable efficient mapping of the high-redshift (z > 2) universe, necessary for probing early universe inflation models. I will briefly describe the R&D for these upgrades.
About David Schlegel
Dr. David Schlegel is a Senior Scientist at the Physics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) in Berkeley, CA. He received his PhD at Berkeley under the tutelage of Prof. Marc Davis in 1995. He then was a PARC Research Fellow at Durham University in the UK, and in 1998, he returned to the US, taking the position of a Research Associate and then a Research Staff Member at Princeton University, where he worked on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In 2004, he moved to LBNL, initially as a Division Fellow, and then as a Senior Scientist. In 2015, he received a prestigious E. O. Lawrence award. He advised a number of post-doctoral scholars, several of whom went on to university faculty positions. He co-authored 680 publications, with 150,000+ citations. Currently he is one of the key scientists working on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the subject of David's colloquium.
Audience: Public
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