Orateur
Description
Galaxy clusters have long proven to be a valuable cosmological tool: arising from the highest peaks of the matter density field, they are a sensitive probe of the growth of structures and cosmic expansion. Current and upcoming wide-area photometric surveys — e.g. the Dark- Energy Survey (DES), the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Euclid — seek to use the abundance and spatial distribution of galaxy clusters to improve constraints on the dark energy and the late-time normalization of the matter power spectrum. One of the main limitation for the exploitation of such a large dataset is our capabil- ity of recovering unbiased cluster mass estimates from observable mass proxies; a task especially challenging in case of optically selected clusters. In this talk I will review the work I have been carrying out in the last few years aimed at the characterization and analysis of the DES photo- metric cluster catalogs, with focus on the systematics affecting optical cluster catalogs and the opportunities and challenges for the exploitation of forthcoming photometric cluster surveys.
