The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14 000 deg² of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.

We consider extra dimensional gauge theories on an interval. We first review the derivation of the consistent boundary conditions (BC's) from the action principle. These BC's include choices that give rise to breaking of the gauge symmetries. The boundary conditions could be chosen to coincide with those commonly applied in orbifold theories, but there are many more possibilities. To investigate the nature of gauge symmetry breaking via BC's we calculate the elastic scattering amplitudes for longitudinal gauge bosons. We find that using a consistent set of BC's the terms in these amplitudes that explicitly grow with energy always cancel without having to introduce any additional scalar degree of freedom, but rather by the exchange of Kaluza--Klein (KK) gauge bosons. This suggests that perhaps the SM Higgs could be completely eliminated in favor of some KK towers of gauge fields. We show that from the low-energy effective theory perspective this seems to be indeed possible. We display an extra dimensional toy model, where BC's introduce a symmetry breaking pattern and mass spectrum that resembles that in the standard model.

We present a 5D gauge theory in warped space based on a bulk $\mathrm{SU}(2{)}_L\times \mathrm{SU}(2{)}_R\times \mathrm{U}(1{)}_{B-L}$ gauge group where the gauge symmetry is broken by boundary conditions. The symmetry breaking pattern and the mass spectrum resemble that in the standard model (SM). To leading order in the warp factor the $\rho$ parameter and the coupling of the $Z$ ($S$ parameter) are as in the SM, while corrections are expected at the level of a percent. From the anti–de Sitter (AdS) conformal field theory point of view the model presented here can be viewed as the AdS dual of a (walking) technicolorlike theory, in the sense that it is the presence of the IR brane itself that breaks electroweak symmetry, and not a localized Higgs on the IR brane (which should be interpreted as a composite Higgs model). This model predicts the lightest $W$, $Z$, and $\gamma$ resonances to be at around 1.2 TeV, and no fundamental (or composite) Higgs particles.