Science interests of DESI
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is a massively multiplexed fiber-
fed spectrograph that will make the next major advance in dark energy in the timeframe
2018-2022. On the Mayall telescope, DESI will obtain spectra and redshifts for at least
18 million emission-line galaxies, 4 million luminous red galaxies and 3 million quasi-
stellar objects, in order to: probe the effects of dark energy on the expansion history
using baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), measure the gravitational growth history
through redshift-space distortions, measure the sum of neutrino masses, and investigate
the signatures of primordial inflation. The resulting 3-D galaxy maps at
z <
2 and
Lyman-alpha forest at
z >
2 will make 1%-level measurements of the distance scale in
35 redshift bins, thus providing unprecedented constraints on cosmological models.
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