| The first part of this thesis analyzes the cosmological application of galaxy clusters. The prevailing paradigm presents structure formation as a hierarchical process in which gravity constantly draws matter together to form increasingly larger structures. Clusters of galaxies sit atop this hierarchy as they are the largest objects in the universe. They also serve as markers for those locations of the highest density fluctuations in the early universe. Forthcoming galaxy cluster surveys, including South Pole Telescope (detecting Sunyaev--Zel'dovich effect of clusters), Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (measuring cluster--induced distortions of the images of distant objects), along with next generation of x-ray observatory, will provide catalogs containing tens of thousand clusters from various selection criteria. These data sets are of great interest, because a number of extensions to the standard cosmological framework, including dynamical dark energy and neutrino masses, affect the growth of structure and hence will be detectable using distributions of these galaxy clusters. We study in detail the statistical potential of these cluster samples to determine the evolution of dark energy and neutrino. |
