The CPAC group carries out research in a wide variety of topics in understanding the “Dark Universe”. This includes work on the cosmic microwave background, cluster cosmology, galaxy clustering and the galaxy-halo connection, high-precision emulators for various cosmological ‘summary statistics’, inflation and primordial fluctuations, multi-probe cross-correlations, neutrinos, and strong and weak gravitational lensing. CPAC research efforts cover purely theoretical questions and ideas as well as work that is observational or very closely connected to observations, mostly with large-scale multi-wavelength sky surveys. These surveys include BOSS, CMB-S4, DES, DESI, eBOSS, LSST, and SPT. We also have connections to the future NASA missions SPHEREx and WFIRST.
Many of the research projects carried out in CPAC use cutting-edge simulations and analysis of the simulation products on high-performance computing platforms. CPAC is the home of the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC), an extreme-scale, high-performance, cosmology simulation code (Gordon Bell Award Finalist for 2012 and 2013) that combines gravity and gasdynamics using particle-based Lagrangian methods. CPAC science projects often use advanced statistical techniques, machine learning, and data-intensive computing.
