TAPIR Seminar

The Dark Energy Survey has measured structures in the evolved Universe using the distribution of galaxies and their gravitational lensing signal in its first-year data. I will give an overview both of the methodology of extracting lensing signals with small and quantified systematic uncertainties, and of the results of these analyses as tests of our cosmological model. Of the complementary ways of probing the matter density field for the purpose of cosmology, I will focus on those that go beyond its Gaussian features: clusters of galaxies, and the full PDF of the galaxy and matter density. A joint view of these statistics and the rapidly increasing data from optical surveys have begun to deliver on the promise of lensing as a leading probe of cosmology.