Abstract:

DESI is a ground-based dark energy experiment that will study baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and the growth of structure through redshift-space distortions (RSD) with a wide-area galaxy and quasar redshift survey. In addition to providing constraints on dark energy, DESI will provide new measurements that can constrain theories of modified gravity and inflation, and will provide a measurement of the sum of neutrino masses to ~0.02 eV. The DESI spectrograph, capable of taking up to 5000 simultaneous spectra, will be installed on the 4-m Mayall telescope in Kitt Peak, Arizona. DESI will conduct a five-year survey designed to cover 14000 deg^2. In total, more than 20 million galaxy and quasar redshifts will be obtained. DESI provides at least an order of magnitude improvement over BOSS both in the comoving volume it probes and the number of galaxies it will map.`