Abstract:

Future cosmological observations targeted at investigations of dark energy pose stringent requirements on the accuracy of theoretical predictions for the clustering of matter. Currently, N-body simulations comprise the only viable approach to this problem. In this talk I will introduce the "Coyote Universe", a simulation suite of almost 1000 simulations, carried out to obtain high-precision predictions for large scale structure probes of cosmology. In order to obtain sub-percent accurate predictions for different cosmological models, two major challenges have to be overcome: (i) showing that the nonlinear regime of structure formation can be predicted at the targeted scales at the required accuracy level, (ii) building a prediction scheme for statistical quantities of interest such as the matter power spectrum over a range of cosmologies at matching precision but from a restricted set of costly simulations. This talk describes our recent work overcoming these challenges.