Enabling LSST Dark Energy Science

A repository for drafting a report regarding "Maximizing Science in the Era of LSST: A Community-based Study of Needed US OIR Capabilities", with a particular focus on enabling LSST studies of dark energy.

To compile the PDF:

pdflatex maximizing_science_dark_energy.tex

Current Goal, for March 28

For each science area, we should:

1. Describe the science need in a few sentences at most

2. Describe the needed capability (or capabilities) in enough detail that someone could determine whether they overlap with other needs. (E.g.: “medium-resolution (R~4000-6000) spectroscopy covering the full optical window for i<25.3 objects with multiplexing of ~1000 over ~10 arcminute diameter fields” could work, or for a differentcase “optical medium-resolution spectroscopy with a highly-multiplexed spectrograph with a many-degree FoV on a 4m telescope” would also give enough information to allow identification of common needs).

---

TimeLine

March 28

Study leads circulate a brief summary of what science motivates what capabilities. Capabilities described in enough detail for other groups to understand overlap.

April 18

Study leads circulate brief "whitepapers" describing the science in greater detail and quantifying the capabilities. Similar to a rough draft of an NOAO observing proposal. It has the same elements of compelling science, technical description and quantitative statement of resource needs. But does not have to be very polished.

May 2-4 Workshop

Feedback from workshop used to refine white papers. Synthesis of needed capabilities, their prioritization, and roadmap of "how to get there" i.e., what exists and what investments needed.

---

Resources

March 28 is coming up quickly, but then again, this has been studied repeatedly for dark energy use cases. Some resources we can use are:

• The meeting report on "Spectroscopy in the Era of LSST" (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2496.pdf) Describes potential science and spectroscopy needs. See especially section 2.4 on Dark Energy & Cosmology (M. Wood-Vasey, facilitator); Appendix 1 is a summary of spectroscopic needs. Note that for that report we were asked to provide estimates with no resource constraints; we need to be a little more realistic this go-round.

• The Elmegreen report on "Optimizing the U.S. Ground-Based Optical and Infrared Astronomy System in the Era of LSST" (http://sites.nationalacademies.org/BPA/BPA_087934).

• A Snowmass white paper on "Spectroscopic Needs for Imaging Dark Energy Experiments", http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5384