Euclid is a European Space Agency medium-class mission selected for launch in 2019 within the Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 program. The main goal of Euclid is to understand the origin of the accelerated...

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 show that, as a result of nonlinear self-interactions, it is feasible, at least in light of the bounds coming from terrestrial tests of gravity, measurements of the Casimir force and those constraints imposed by the physics of compact objects, big-bang nucleosynthesis and measurements of the cosmic microwave background, for there to exist, in our Universe, one or more scalar fields that couple to matter much more strongly than gravity does. These scalar fields behave like chameleons: changing their properties to fit their surroundings. As a result these scalar fields can be not only very strongly coupled to matter, but also remain relatively light over solar-system scales. These fields could also be detected by a number of future experiments provided they are properly designed to do so. These results open up an altogether new window, which might lead to a completely different view of the rôle played by light scalar fields in particle physics and cosmology.

We investigate the consequences of an imperfect dark energy fluid on the large scale structure. A phenomenological three parameter fluid description is used to study the effect of dark energy on the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and matter power spectrum. In addition to the equation of state and the sound speed, we allow a nonzero viscosity parameter for the fluid. Then anisotropic stress perturbations are generated in dark energy. In general, we find that this possibility is not excluded by the present day cosmological observations. In the simplest case when all of the three parameters are constant, we find that the observable effects of the anisotropic stress can be closely mimicked by varying the sound speed of perfect dark energy. However, now also negative values for the sound speed, as expected for adiabatic fluid model, are tolerable and in fact could explain the observed low quadrupole in the CMBR spectrum. We investigate also structure formation of imperfect fluid dark energy characterized by an evolving equation of state. In particular, we study models unifying dark energy with dark matter, such as the Chaplygin gas or the Cardassian expansion, with a shear perturbation included. This can stabilize the growth of inhomogeneities in these models, thus somewhat improving their compatibility with large scale structure observations.