
"Testing consistency of growth and expansion with the Dark Energy Survey"
Jessie Muir (Stanford)
I will present a recent analysis Dark Energy Survey Year 1 data in which we use a "growth-geometry split" parameterization to test the consistency of constraints from measurements of the Universe’s expansion history (geometry) and of large scale structure growth. This study serves as both an approximately model-independent test for physics beyond the cosmological standard model --- particularly modified gravity, since models which extend our description of gravity on cosmological scales tend to break the relationship between expansion and growth expected for general relativity --- and an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how DES measurements provide cosmological information. After describing our implementation of this analysis and its results, I will briefly highlight some future prospects for improving constraints on non-standard cosmological structure growth.
"High-Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos as a Window to the Universe"
Qinrui Liu (Wisconsin-Madison)
High-energy neutrinos are unique astronomical messengers. The IceCube experiment discovered PeV-energy neutrinos originating beyond our Galaxy with an energy flux that is comparable to that of TeV-energy gamma rays and EeV-energy cosmic rays. Neutrinos provide the only unobstructed view of the cosmic accelerators that power the highest energy radiation reaching us from the Universe and provide us with a beam to study the neutrinos themselves. In this talk, I will discuss the searches for their sources emphasizing my efforts to identify sources in our Galaxy, the search for physics beyond the Standard Model and, finally, remark on the potential of next-generation experiments to probe challenging outstanding questions.