- New DIFT Colloquium “The Mystery of Cosmic Acceleration” by David Weinberg
On Wednesday , March 18, the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT) and the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) held a new edition of the DIFT Colloquium, which took place in the CFTMAT Auditorium from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. The lecture, titled “The Mystery of Cosmic Acceleration”, was delivered by David Weinberg, a renowned physicist from The Ohio State University, USA.
Cosmic acceleration is one of the most surprising cosmological discoveries of the past century. Even the “simplest” explanations require new, cosmologically dominant energy components with exotic physical properties. Current and near-future experiments are seeking clues to the origin of cosmic acceleration by measuring the history of expansion and structure growth with sub-percent precision over a wide span of redshift. We will review the observational methods that underpin these measurements and assess the current state of play, with particular attention to recentmeasurements from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) which suggest that the properties of dark energy are evolving at a startling rate. We will discuss the prospects and challenges for the new generation ofexperiments — DESI, the Euclid mission, the Vera Rubin Observatory,and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — which aim to sharpen cosmological measurements by a factor of ten.
This lecture is part of the DIFT Colloquia 2026, organized by the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT UAM-CSIC). Held in Madrid on March 18, 2026.