Observational Cosmology Seminar

Large-scale structure measurements of several cosmological parameters are now competitive with those from the Cosmic Microwave Background, largely through measurements of structure formation from the galaxy power spectrum and its acoustic oscillation feature. This achievement has been made possible through drastic improvements in survey data (e.g. from DESI) coupled with the development of robust symmetries-based phenomenology for modeling the clustering of various types of LSS tracers. I will discuss several aspects of my recent work extending said tracer models to better answer key physical questions about the universe at large. I will also discuss my recent work considering the impact of a very high value of the optical depth to reionization and its ability to restore concordance within flat LambdaCDM cosmology. These results will incorporate a comparison of various CMB likelihoods including CMB lensing, the exchange of which does not impact the concerning power of a high optical depth. Further, I will discuss a consistency measurement of this parameter from the combined power spectrum + bispectrum likelihood from DESI DR1 clustering.