Wide-field cosmology in the 2020s

Abstract: The fundamental nature of dark matter and dark energy affect our Universe in ways that we can probe through its expansion and evolution over cosmic scales of distance and time. From precision measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation near the beginning of the Universe through to the first sets of precision weak lensing measurements made in the past decade, we are now leveraging data spanning half the age of the Universe in a rapidly expanding explosion of cosmological information from optical and near-infrared imaging surveys. This will soon culminate in the 2020s with the start of several revolutionary observatories on the ground and in space. To tame this explosion of data, we need an equally revolutionary transformation in our simulation and calibration capabilities. I will give an overview of where we are now with current wide-field weak lensing surveys, what we look can look forward to in the next five years, and what a new paradigm of survey simulation might look like. This work will hopefully lead us to a conclusion in the 2030s where we combine observations from the mountains of Chile to a million miles away in space, from redshift 0 to redshift 1000+, from 0.3 to 2 microns, and from teams all over the world to constrain the (nearly) full history of the evolution of structure in the Universe.