A strong instrumentation and detector R&D program has enabled the current generation of cosmic frontier surveys. A small investment in R&D will continue to pay dividends and enable new probes to investigate the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Instrumentation and detector R&D provide critical training opportunities for future generations of experimentalists, skills that are important across the entire Department of Energy High Energy Physics program.
Cosmic surveys provide crucial information about high energy physics including strong evidence for dark energy, dark matter, and inflation. Ongoing and upcoming surveys will start to identify the underlying physics of these new phenomena, including t
ight constraints on the equation of state of dark energy, the viability of modified gravity, the existence of extra light species, the masses of the neutrinos, and the potential of the field that drove inflation. Even after the Stage IV experiments, DESI and LSST, complete their surveys, there will still be much information left in the sky. This additional information will enable us to understand the physics underlying the dark universe at an even deeper level and, in case Stage IV surveys find hints for physics beyond the current Standard Model of Cosmology, to revolutionize our current view of the universe. There are many ideas for how best to supplement and aid DESI and LSST in order to access some of this remaining information and how surveys beyond Stage IV can fully exploit this regime. These ideas flow to potential projects that could start construction in the 2020s.
