Advancing weak lensing and intrinsic galaxy alignment studies into the era of precision cosmology

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Cosmologists can nowadays successfully explain the key features of the Universe in a consistent framework. However it is puzzling that 95% of the cosmic ingredients appear to be in exotic forms of matter whose nature is still obscure. One finds that all astronomical objects, ranging from galaxies up to the largest structures, weigh more than the amount of light which they emit suggests. Hence, the majority of matter must be of a yet unknown, non-luminous type, termed dark matter. Furthermore, the geometry of the Universe and its accelerating expansion hint at the existence of dark energy, an even more exotic component that supposedly makes up three quarters of the total cosmic energy budget.Gravitational lensing is one of the most powerful ways of revealing the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that massive bodies deflect light such that a galaxy can focus the light from a background source like a magnifying glass - it acts as a gravitational lens. Similar to the effects close to the rim of a magnifying glass, the images of distant galaxies are distorted by the deflections of light by the matter along the line of sight. Measuring these tiny distortions on billions of galaxies, we can probe the distribution of matter between those galaxies and Earth, which in turn is determined by the properties of dark matter and dark energy. This method of analysing large numbers of distorted galaxy images with statistical tools is called cosmic shear.My work aims at determining the properties of the dark building blocks of the Universe with high precision, using cosmic shear measured on large fractions of the sky. I am going to combine measurements of galaxy image distortions with those of galaxy positions, velocities, and distances to go even further and test whether our theory of gravity is still correct on cosmological scales. To make the most of upcoming cosmological data sets, as e.g. produced by the European Euclid satellite whose design I have contributed to, I am going to develop and apply new measurement methods and analysis tools which allow us to access information that has remained unused hitherto.Obtaining highly accurate measurements is crucial, but it is equally important that they do not suffer from so-called "systematic errors": undetected deviations from the true result which would produce wrong answers and lead us to incorrect conclusions, much like measuring masses with a balance that has a faulty scale. A serious systematic error is caused by galaxies which are deformed and aligned by the gravitational pull exerted by matter in their neighbourhood. This effect, called intrinsic alignment, mimics the distortions that we want to measure in cosmic shear and thus causes strong systematic errors if ignored. However, intrinsic galaxy alignment is not only a nuisance to cosmic shear measurements, but can provide us with valuable insight into processes of galaxy formation and evolution which are still largely unknown at present. To improve both our understanding of galaxies and the control of cosmic shear systematic errors, I will undertake the hitherto biggest effort of measuring and analysing intrinsic alignments, combining large data sets taken with telescopes at the world's best observational sites on Hawaii and the Canary Islands, in the Atacama desert and Australia.By studying cosmic shear and intrinsic galaxy alignments jointly, I will be able to extract a maximum of information from each of these cosmological probes, yielding unique insights into both the dark and bright Universe.