Filippo Vernizzi - April 16, 2015

A unifying description of dark energy

The present accelerated expansion of the Universe has greatly stimulated
theorists’ creativity. Currently, there are so many dark energy scenarios, each
leading to a different phenomenology, that it will be hard to compare their
predictions with the observations of future surveys, such as Euclid. I will
review an approach to describe dark energy and modified gravity models under a
unifying framework. I will explain how to translate any existing or future model
into this description and address their theoretical consistency. Finally, I will
discuss the link with observations and show that this approach provides the most
efficient way to constrain deviations from LCDM with current and future
cosmological observations.