Presentation of the Second Big Challenge Symposium - The Big Challenge of Cosmological Understanding: Gravitation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Towards New Scenarios
This Symposium is devoted to the Memory of Lev Kofman, June-17-1957-November-12-2009. The accelerated expansion of the Universe, which is today observed, shows that cosmological dynamics is dominated by the so-called Dark Energy field which provides a large negative pressure. This is the standard picture, in which such new ingredient is considered as a source of the right hand side of the field equations. It should be some form of non-clustered non-zero vacuum energy which, together with the clustered Dark Matter, drives the global dynamics. This is the so-called "concordance model" (ACDM) which gives, in agreement with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), dim Lyman Limit Systems (LLS) and type la supernovae (SNeIa) data, a good framework to understand the today observed Universe. However, it presents several shortcomings as the well known "coincidence" and "cosmological constant" problems . An alternative approach is to have a better understanding of the energy concept in General Relativity and also to change the left hand side of the field equations, and check if observed cosmic dynamics can be achieved by extending general relativity. In this different context, it is not required to search candidates for Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which till now have not been found. Rather, one can only stand on the "observed" ingredients: curvature and baryon matter, to account for the observations. Considering this point of view, one can think of that gravity is not scale-invariant. The goal of this Symposium is to obtain a tapestry of the present status of theory and observations concerning Gravitation and Dark Universe.