NEVO: illuminating the dark cosmos

Think of the universe as a huge balloon that is always expanding. The further away a point is on the balloon, the faster it is expanding away from you. This is similar to how the universe is expanding, and the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us on Earth. For many years, scientists thought that the expansion of the universe was slowing down. Their reasoning was that the gravitational pull from all the matter in the universe was working against this expansion. However, in 1998, cosmologists made a surprising discovery through the study of distant supernovae: the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating! This means that the distance between galaxies is getting larger and larger at an ever-increasing rate. It's like the balloon is being inflated faster and faster. Scientists don't know exactly what is causing the universe to accelerate. They call the unknown force that is causing this to happen "dark energy." Dark energy is everywhere in the universe, but it doesn't interact with matter in the forms that we can observe directly. The NEVO project is a new effort to understand the nature of dark energy. NEVO will use powerful computers to simulate the universe and study the effects of dark energy candidates in a way that has never been done before. By studying these simulations and leveraging the high-precision observations from the recently launched Euclid telescope, cosmologists will be able to significantly advance our understanding of the elusive nature of dark energy.

The Universe has entered an accelerating expansion phase in the last few billion years of its evolution, a phenomenon that is caused by the mysterious entity known as dark energy. Through the NEVO proposal, I aim to provide key insights about the properties of dark energy, which includes its time evolution and spatial distribution in the Universe. This objective will be achieved by utilizing cutting-edge cosmological N-body simulations and novel techniques to study cosmic EVOlution accurately. A comprehensive understanding of the nature of dark energy requires a thorough investigation of viable candidates and their impact on different stages of the Universe. However, the consistent and accurate modeling of dark energy candidates has been largely neglected so far. To address this gap, I propose the development of a novel, integrated framework that utilizes state-of-the-art relativistic N-body simulations along with the hi_class code, to accurately model dark energy candidates in both linear and non-linear scales.