Academia Sinica Logo

With the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) well into its five-year run and first cosmology data from experiments like the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS), the Rubin Observatory (LSST), and Simons Observatory (SO) imminent, we are entering an unprecedented new regime in precision cosmology. Simultaneously, the past decade has seen significant advances in the modeling of cosmological structure formation from first principles, particularly by leveraging techniques from effective field theory (EFT) to consistently account for the impact of complex astrophysical effects in galaxy formation and evolution. Indeed, the so-called “EFT of Large-Scale Structure” has become the technique of choice for extracting fundamental physics from spectroscopic surveys like DESI. In this talk I will review some of these developments, including the analysis of DESI data, and argue that the same techniques can be extended beyond spectroscopic surveys to analyze upcoming data from weak lensing surveys like LSST, and beyond. I will also discuss synergies between these techniques and simulations-based methods in cosmology, and how both will be necessary to conduct the most optimal and robust searches for fundamental physics in upcoming data.