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We study a simple braneworld model in which the universe is filled solely with cold dark matter and a cosmological constant, although the effective dark energy is phantom-like due extra-dimensional gravity effects. Theoretically the cosmological constant Λ is screened by modified gravity, so that a larger Λ can be accommodated, but actually observations do not seem to favour any screening significantly. Using supernova data, the cosmic microwave background shift parameter, and the baryon oscillation peak in the galaxy distribution we set constrains to the model. We find the mean value of Ωm with 68% confidence limits, and an upper limit on ΩΛ at the 68% confidence level. We conclude the best-fit model is very close to a standard LCDM model, but the LCDM model represents a better fit since it has one less parameter.

We introduce the Galaxy Intensity Mapping cross-COrrelation estimator (GIMCO), which is a new tomographic estimator for the gravitational lensing potential, based on a combination of intensity mapping (IM) and galaxy number counts. The estimator can be written schematically as IM\\((z_f)\\times\\)galaxy\\((z_b)\\) \\(-\\) galaxy\\((z_f)\\times\\)IM\\((z_b)\\) for a pair of distinct redshifts \\((z_f,z_b)\\); this combination allows to greatly reduce the contamination by density-density correlations, thus isolating the lensing signal. As an estimator constructed only from cross-correlations, it is additionally less susceptible to systematic effects. We show that the new estimator strongly suppresses cosmic variance and consequently improves the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the detection of lensing, especially on linear scales and intermediate redshifts. %This makes it particularly valuable for future studies of dark energy and modified gravity. For cosmic variance dominated surveys, the SNR of our estimator is a factor 30 larger than the SNR obtained from the correlation of galaxy number counts only. Shot noise and interferometer noise reduce the SNR. For the specific example of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) cross-correlated with the Hydrogen Intensity mapping and Real time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX), the SNR is around 4, whereas for Euclid cross-correlated with HIRAX it reaches 52. This corresponds to an improvement of a factor 4-5 compared to the SNR from DES alone. For Euclid cross-correlated with HIRAX the improvement with respect to Euclid alone strongly depends on the redshift. We find that the improvement is particularly important for redshifts below 1.6, where it reaches a factor of 5. This makes our estimator especially valuable to test dark energy and modified gravity, that are expected to leave an impact at low and intermediate redshifts.

In this paper, we study lensing of 21cm intensity mapping (IM). Like in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), there is no first order lensing in intensity mapping. The first effects in the power spectrum are therefore of second and third order. Despite this, lensing of the CMB power spectrum is an important effect that needs to be taken into account, which motivates the study of the impact of lensing on the IM power spectrum. We derive a general formula up to third order in perturbation theory including all the terms with two derivatives of the gravitational potential, i.e. the dominant terms on sub-Hubble scales. We then show that in intensity mapping there is a new lensing term which is not present in the CMB. We obtain that the signal-to-noise of 21 cm lensing for futuristic surveys like SKA2 is about 10. We find that surveys probing only large scales, lmax < 700, can safely neglect the lensing of the intensity mapping power spectrum, but that otherwise this effect should be included.

We explore the backreaction model based on the template metric proposed in Larena et al. (2008) constraining the matter density parameter \\(\\Omega_m^{D_0}\\) and the Dark Energy parameter \\(w\\) with recent data. We provide constraints based on Supernovae Ia from the SNLS and the Union2.1 catalogs, confirming that the backreacted Universe should have a higher matter density than the corresponding Friedmaniann one. Angular diameter distances from clusters data confirm the same feature. Finally we combine these results with constraints obtained from the position of the first three peaks and the first dip of the CMB power spectrum, fitting WMAP-9 and Planck data. We find that an inconsistency arises in predicting the scale factor at recombination, leading to a backreacted Universe with lower matter density, in contradiction with results produced by SnIa and clusters. The same behavior is confirmed by analyzing the CMB-shift parameters from WMAP-9. We conclude exploring qualitatively the motivations of this inconsistency.

Future galaxy clustering surveys will probe small scales where non-linearities become important. Since the number of modes accessible on intermediate to small scales is very high, having a precise model at these scales is important especially in the context of discriminating alternative cosmological models from the standard one. In the mildly non-linear regime, such models typically differ from each other, and galaxy clustering data will become very precise on these scales in the near future. As the observable quantity is the angular power spectrum in redshift space, it is important to study the effects of non-linear density and redshift space distortion (RSD) in the angular power spectrum. We compute non-linear contributions to the angular power spectrum using a flat-sky approximation that we introduce in this work, and compare the results of different perturbative approaches with \\(N\\)-body simulations. We find that the TNS perturbative approach is significantly closer to the \\(N\\)-body result than Eulerian or Lagrangian 1-loop approximations, effective field theory of large scale structure or a halofit-inspired model. However, none of these prescriptions is accurate enough to model the angular power spectrum well into the non-linear regime. In addition, for narrow redshift bins, \\(\\Delta z \\lesssim 0.01\\), the angular power spectrum acquires non-linear contributions on all scales, right down to \\(\\ell=2\\), and is hence not a reliable tool at this time. To overcome this problem, we need to model non-linear RSD terms, for example as TNS does, but for a matter power spectrum that remains reasonably accurate well into the deeply non-linear regime, such as halofit.

The characterisation of dark energy is one of the primary goals in cosmology especially now that many new experiments are being planned with the aim of reaching a high sensitivity on cosmological parameters. It is known that if we move away from the simple cosmological constant model then we need to consider perturbations in the dark energy fluid. This means that dark energy has two extra degrees of freedom: the sound speed \\(\\cs\\) and the anisotropic stress \\(\\sigma\\). If dark energy is inhomogenous at the scales of interest then the gravitational potentials are modified and the evolution of the dark matter perturbations is also directly affected. In this paper we add an anisotropic component to the dark energy perturbations. Following the idea introduced in \\cite{Sapone:2009mb}, we solve analytically the equations of perturbations in the dark sector, finding simple and accurate approximated solutions. We also find that the evolution of the density perturbations is governed by an effective sound speed which depends on both the sound speed and the anisotropic stress parameter. We then use these solutions to look at the impact of the dark energy perturbations on the matter power spectrum and on the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Cosmological fluids are commonly assumed to be distributed in a spatially homogeneous way, while their internal properties are described by a perfect fluid. As such, they influence the Hubble-expansion through their respective densities and equation of state parameters. The subject of this paper is an investigation of the fluid-mechanical properties of a dark energy fluid, which is characterised by its sound speed and its viscosity apart from its equation of state. In particular, we compute the predicted spectra for the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect for our generalised fluid, and compare them with the corresponding predictions for weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering, which had been computed in previous work. We perform statistical forecasts and show that the integrated Sachs-Wolfe signal obtained by cross correlating Euclid galaxies with Planck temperatures, when joined to galaxy clustering and weak lensing observations, yields a percent sensitivity on the dark energy sound speed and viscosity. We prove that the iSW effect provides strong degeneracy breaking for low sound speeds and large differences between the sound speed and viscosity parameters.

We test the FLRW cosmology by reconstructing in a model-independent way both the Hubble parameter \\(H(z)\\) and the comoving distance \\(D(z)\\) via the most recent Hubble and Supernovae Ia data. In particular we use: data binning with direct error propagation, the principal component analysis, the genetic algorithms and the Padé approximation. Using our reconstructions we evaluate the Clarkson {\\it et al} test known as \\(\\Omega_K(z)\\), whose value is constant in redshift for the standard cosmological model, but deviates elsewise. We find good agreement with the expected values of the standard cosmological model within the experimental errors. Finally, we provide forecasts, exploiting the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations measurements from the Euclid survey.

Recent work has demonstrated that it is important to constrain the dynamics of cosmological perturbations, in addition to the evolution of the background, if we want to distinguish among different models of the dark sector. Especially the anisotropic stress of the (possibly effective) dark energy fluid has been shown to be an important discriminator between modified gravity and dark energy models. In this paper we use approximate analytical solutions of the perturbation equations in the presence of viscosity to study how the anisotropic stress affects the weak lensing and galaxy power spectrum. We then forecast how sensitive the photometric and spectroscopic Euclid surveys will be to both the speed of sound and the viscosity of our effective dark energy fluid when using weak lensing tomography and the galaxy power spectrum. We find that Euclid alone can only constrain models with very small speed of sound and viscosity, while it will need the help of other observables in order to give interesting constraints on models with a sound speed close to one. This conclusion is also supported by the expected Bayes factor between models.

Recently H(z) data obtained from differential ages of galaxies have been proposed as a new geometrical probe of dark energy. In this paper we use those data, combined with other background tests (CMB shift and SNIa data), to constrain a set of general relativistic dark energy models together with some other models motivated by extra dimensions. Our analysis rests mostly on Bayesian statistics, and we conclude that LCDM is at least substantially favoured, and that braneworld models are less favoured than general relativistic ones.