Master thesis: Probing dark energy inhomogeneities; two approaches

by Mr Jonas Enander (OKC/CoPS)

Wednesday 2 Jun 2010, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Stockholm

A5:1041

In this master thesis, two approaches to constrain dark energy inhomogeneities are investigated. The first approach uses gravitational waves from inspiraling supermassive black holes, in connection with dark energy accretion onto the black holes, to discern the sign of 1+w, where w is the equation of state of dark energy. The second approach uses angular correlations from supernovae to put limits on a phenomenological dark energy fluctuation power spectrum. We show that the first approach is not feasible, while the second approach is observationally interesting given more supernova data.