W. M. Wood-Vasey
Harvard University

Determining the Nature of Dark Energy:
Cosmology with ESSENCE, Pan-STARRS, SPT, LSST, and Other Acronyms

Solving the mystery of the dark energy accelerating the expansion of our 
Universe is quite arguably the greatest challenge facing the astronomical 
and physics communities today.  Our group at Harvard is attacking this problem 
through several complementary observational programs.  I will begin my talk 
by presenting the first cosmological results from the ESSENCE supernova survey, 
which is a six-year project on the CTIO 4-m telescope to discover and study 200 
Type Ia supernovae to determine the properties of dark energy.  After discussing 
the expectations for the final six-year ESSENCE cosmological results, I will 
describe a complementary program we are starting to further constrain the 
properties of dark energy by measuring photometric redshifts, X-ray luminosities, 
and lensing properties of clusters from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich 
effect survey.  I will spend the remainder of the time focusing on the challenges 
and opportunities for observational constraints on dark energy in upcoming large-scale 
surveys such as Pan-STARRS and LSST.