The full shape of the large-scale galaxy power spectrum: modelling and cosmological implications

Dark energy, which constitutes about 73% of the total energy
density and causes the Universe expansion to accelerate, is one of
the most important open problems in physics. The nature of dark
energy can be inferred from its effects on the evolution of the
Universe and the growth of structures as it influences the
distribution of galaxies and gas at cosmological scales at low and
intermediate redshifts. To extract unbiased information from the
large scale galaxy power spectrum, accurate models, encoding the
distortions due to non-linear evolution, bias and redshift space
distortions, are needed. In this thesis I present a model for the
full shape of the power spectrum and test its validity against a
suite of 50 large volume, moderate resolution N-body dark matter
simulations. My results indicate that this simple model provides an
accurate description of the full shape of the dark matter and halo
power spectrum, both in real and redshift space, for k