Introduction to the Rubin Observatory, LSST Survey and its instrumentation

The Rubin Observatory is a next-generation optical survey observatory currently under construction on the summit of La Pachon in Chile. It is being built to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) which will provide an unprecedentedly deep, high cadence survey of the southern sky over the 10-year duration. The science goals of LSST are extremely broad, covering astrophysical themes from the solar system to transient events to large scale structure. In particular, as particle physicists, we are interested in the dark energy and weak lensing aspect of the survey, which hopes to further constrain the known properties of dark matter and dark energy. To achieve its science goals, the Rubin Observatory has a novel and challenging instrument design, combining a modified Paul-Baker design telescope with a 3.2 gigapixel camera, and a new data processing system to deal with the 12TB of survey pixel data and ~million transient alerts expected per night of operation. This seminar will cover briefly the dark energy science aspects of the LSST and will cover in some more depth the instrumentation and how it is optimised to achieve the science goals of LSST. We will highlight some of the contributions made by Oxford particle physicists to the development and construction of the LSST.