Unified Dark Matter-Energy models (UDM), a class of models where dark matter and dark energy exist as a single cosmological fluid, are an alternative approach to ΛCDM. In this work we focus on a model with a fast transition between dark matter-like and dark energy-like behaviour. The epoch and rapidity of the transition are the key features to enable the formation of structure in this model. We have studied its viability using CMB and Weak Lensing data with nested sampling inference methods. We found that the preferred region of the parameter space is the one with early and fast transition models, where it also lies the model's ΛCDM limit. Our study confirms that this UDM model is able to form cosmological structure compatible with the data used.

We present the Flagship galaxy mock, a simulated catalogue of billions of galaxies designed to support the scientific exploitation of the Euclid mission. Euclid is a medium-class mission of the European Space Agency optimised to determine the properties of dark matter and dark energy on the largest scales of the Universe. It probes structure formation over more than 10 billion years primarily from the combination of weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering data. The breath of Euclid's data will also foster a wide variety of scientific analyses. The Flagship simulation was developed to provide a realistic approximation to the galaxies that will be observed by Euclid and used in its scientific analyses. We ran a state-of-the-art N-body simulation with four trillion particles, producing a lightcone on the fly. From the dark matter particles, we produced a catalogue of 16 billion haloes in one octant of the sky in the lightcone up to redshift z=3. We then populated these haloes with mock galaxies using a halo occupation distribution and abundance matching approach, calibrating the free parameters of the galaxy mock against observed correlations and other basic galaxy properties. Modelled galaxy properties include luminosity and flux in several bands, redshifts, positions and velocities, spectral energy distributions, shapes and sizes, stellar masses, star formation rates, metallicities, emission line fluxes, and lensing properties. We selected a final sample of 3.4 billion galaxies with a magnitude cut of H_E<26, where we are complete. We have performed a comprehensive set of validation tests to check the similarity to observational data and theoretical models. In particular, our catalogue is able to closely reproduce the main characteristics of the weak lensing and galaxy clustering samples to be used in the mission's main cosmological analysis. (abridged)

Context. The Euclid mission of the European Space Agency will deliver weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering surveys that can be used to constrain the standard cosmological model and extensions thereof. Aims. We present forecasts from the combination of the Euclid photometric galaxy surveys (weak lensing, galaxy clustering, and their crosscorrelations) and its spectroscopic redshift survey with respect to their sensitivity to cosmological parameters. We include the summed neutrino mass, Sigma m (v), and the e ffective number of relativistic species, N-e ff, in the standard Lambda alpha CDM scenario and in the dynamical dark energy (w (0) w(alpha)CDM) scenario. Methods. We compared the accuracy of di fferent algorithms predicting the non-linear matter power spectrum for such models. We then validated several pipelines for Fisher matrix and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) forecasts, using di fferent theory codes, algorithms for numerical derivatives, and assumptions on the non-linear cut-o ff scale. Results. The Euclid primary probes alone will reach a sensitivity of sigma(Sigma m (v) = 60 meV) = 56 meV in the Lambda CDM +Sigma m (v) model, whereas the combination with cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from Planck is expected to achieve sigma(Sigma m (v)) = 23 meV, o ffering evidence of a non-zero neutrino mass to at least the 2:6 sigma level. This could be pushed to a 4 sigma detection if future CMB data from LiteBIRD and CMB Stage-IV were included. In combination with Planck, Euclid will also deliver tight constraints on Delta N-e ff < 0:144 (95%CL) in the Lambda CDM +Sigma m (v)+N-e ff model or even Delta N-e ff < 0:063 when future CMB data are included. When floating the dark energy parameters, we find that the sensitivity to Ne ff remains stable, but for Sigma m (v), it gets degraded by up to a factor of 2, at most. Conclusions. This work illustrates the complementarity among the Euclid spectroscopic and photometric surveys and among Euclid and CMB constraints. Euclid will o ffer great potential in measuring the neutrino mass and excluding well-motivated scenarios with additional relativistic particles.

This paper presents a search for high redshift galaxies from the Euclid Early Release Observations program `Magnifying Lens.' The 1.5\,$ area covered by the twin Abell lensing cluster fields is comparable in size to the few other deep near-infrared surveys such as COSMOS, and so provides an opportunity to significantly increase known samples of rare UV-bright galaxies at $z UV Beyond their still uncertain role in reionisation, these UV-bright galaxies are ideal laboratories from which to study galaxy formation and constrain the bright-end of the UV luminosity function. Of the sources detected from a combined and NISP detection image, 168 do not have any appreciable VIS/ flux. These objects span a range in spectral colours, separated into two classes: 139 extremely red sources; and 29 Lyman-break galaxy candidates. Best-fit redshifts and spectral templates suggest the former is composed of both $z dusty star-forming galaxies and $z quiescent systems. The latter is composed of more homogeneous Lyman-break galaxies at $z In both cases, contamination by L- and T-type dwarfs cannot be ruled out with images alone. Additional contamination from instrumental persistence is investigated using a novel time series analysis. This work lays the foundation for future searches within the Euclid Deep Fields, where thousands more $z Lyman-break systems and extremely red sources will be identified.

We provide an early assessment of the imaging capabilities of the Euclid space mission to probe deeply into nearby star-forming regions and associated very young open clusters, and in particular to check to what extent it can shed light on the new-born free-floating planet population. This paper focuses on a low-reddening region observed in just one Euclid pointing where the dust and gas has been cleared out by the hot sigma Orionis star. One late-M and six known spectroscopically confirmed L-type substellar members in the sigma Orionis cluster are used as benchmarks to provide a high-purity procedure to select new candidate members with Euclid. The exquisite angular resolution and depth delivered by the Euclid instruments allow us to focus on bona-fide point sources. A cleaned sample of sigma Orionis cluster substellar members has been produced and the initial mass function (IMF) has been estimated by combining Euclid and Gaia data. Our sigma Orionis substellar IMF is consistent with a power-law distribution with no significant steepening at the planetary-mass end. No evidence of a low-mass cutoff is found down to about 4 Jupiter masses at the young age (3 Myr) of the sigma Orionis open cluster.

The Euclid Early Release Observations (ERO) showcase Euclid's capabilities in advance of its main mission by targeting 17 astronomical objects, including galaxy clusters, nearby galaxies, globular clusters, and star-forming regions. A total of 24 hours of observing time was allocated in the early months of operation, and the scientific community was engaged through an early public data release. We describe the development of the ERO pipeline to create visually compelling images while simultaneously meeting the scientific demands within months of launch by leveraging a pragmatic data-driven development strategy. The pipeline's key requirements are to preserve the image quality and to provide flux calibration and photometry for compact and extended sources. The pipeline's five pillars are removal of instrumental signatures, astrometric calibration, photometric calibration, image stacking, and the production of science-ready catalogues for both the VIS and NISP instruments. We report a point spread function (PSF) with a full width at half maximum of 0.'' 16 in the optical I-E-band and 0.'' 49 in the near-infrared (NIR) bands Y-E, J(E), and H-E. Our VIS mean absolute flux calibration is accurate to about 1%, and the accuracy is 10% for NISP due to a limited calibration set; both instruments have considerable colour terms for individual sources. The median depth is 25.3 and 23.2 AB mag with a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of ten for galaxies, while it is 27.1 and 24.5 AB mag at an S/N of five for point sources for VIS and NISP, respectively. Euclid's ability to observe diffuse emission is exceptional due to its extended PSF nearly matching a pure diffraction halo, the best ever achieved by a wide-field high-resolution imaging telescope. Euclid offers unparalleled capabilities for exploring the low-surface brightness (LSB) Universe across all scales, providing high precision within a wide field of view (FoV), and opening a new observational window in the NIR. Median surface-brightness levels of 29.5 and 27.9, AB mag arcsec(-2) are achieved for VIS and NISP, respectively, for detecting a 10 '' x 10 '' extended feature at the 1 sigma level.

Gravitational redshift and Doppler effects give rise to an antisymmetric component of the galaxy correlation function when cross-correlating two galaxy populations or two different tracers. In this paper, we assess the detectability of these effects in the Euclid spectroscopic galaxy survey. We model the impact of gravitational redshift on the observed redshift of galaxies in the Flagship mock catalogue using a Navarro-Frenk-White profile for the host haloes. We isolate these relativistic effects, largely subdominant in the standard analysis, by splitting the galaxy catalogue into two populations of faint and bright objects and estimating the dipole of their cross-correlation in four redshift bins. In the simulated catalogue, we detect the dipole signal on scales below 30 h(-1) Mpc, with detection significances of 4 sigma and 3 sigma in the two lowest redshift bins, respectively. At higher redshifts, the detection significance drops below 2 sigma. Overall, we estimate the total detection significance in the Euclid spectroscopic sample to be approximately 6 sigma. We find that on small scales, the major contribution to the signal comes from the nonlinear gravitational potential. Our study on the Flagship mock catalogue shows that this observable can be detected in Euclid Data Release 2 and beyond.

As part of the Early Release Observations (ERO) programme, we analysed deep, wide-field imaging from the VIS and NISP instruments of two Milky Way globular clusters (GCs), namely NGC 6254 (M10) and NGC 6397, to look for observational evidence of their dynamical interaction with the Milky Way. We searched for such an interaction in the form of structural and morphological features in the clusters' outermost regions, which would be suggestive of the development of tidal tails on scales larger than those sampled by the ERO data. From our multi-band photometric analysis, we obtained deep and well-behaved colour--magnitude diagrams that, in turn, enabled an accurate membership selection. The surface brightness profiles built from these samples of member stars are the deepest ever obtained for these two Milky Way GCs, reaching down to $ mag/arcsec$^2$, which is $ mag/arcsec$^2$ lower than before. The investigation of the two-dimensional density map of NGC 6254 reveals an elongated morphology of the cluster peripheries in the direction and with the amplitude predicted by $N$-body simulations of the cluster's dynamical evolution, at high statistical significance. We interpret this as strong evidence for the first detection of tidally induced morphological distortion around this cluster. The density map of NGC 6397 reveals a slightly elliptical morphology, in agreement with previous studies, which requires further investigation on larger scales to be properly interpreted. This ERO project thus demonstrates the power of in studying the outer regions of GCs at an unprecedented level of detail, thanks to the combination of the large field of view, high spatial resolution, and depth enabled by the telescope. Our results highlight the future survey as the ideal dataset for investigating GC tidal tails and stellar streams.

We present an analysis of Euclid observations of a 0.5 deg$^2$ field in the central region of the Fornax galaxy cluster that were acquired during the performance verification phase. With these data, we investigate the potential of Euclid for identifying GCs at 20 Mpc, and validate the search methods using artificial GCs and known GCs within the field from the literature. Our analysis of artificial GCs injected into the data shows that Euclid's data in $I_{\rm E}$ band is 80% complete at about $I_{\rm E} \sim 26.0$ mag ($M_{V\rm } \sim -5.0$ mag), and resolves GCs as small as $r_{\rm h} = 2.5$ pc. In the $I_{\rm E}$ band, we detect more than 95% of the known GCs from previous spectroscopic surveys and GC candidates of the ACS Fornax Cluster Survey, of which more than 80% are resolved. We identify more than 5000 new GC candidates within the field of view down to $I_{\rm E}$ mag, about 1.5 mag fainter than the typical GC luminosity function turn-over magnitude, and investigate their spatial distribution within the intracluster field. We then focus on the GC candidates around dwarf galaxies and investigate their numbers, stacked luminosity distribution and stacked radial distribution. While the overall GC properties are consistent with those in the literature, an interesting over-representation of relatively bright candidates is found within a small number of relatively GC-rich dwarf galaxies. Our work confirms the capabilities of Euclid data in detecting GCs and separating them from foreground and background contaminants at a distance of 20 Mpc, particularly for low-GC count systems such as dwarf galaxies.

Extragalactic globular clusters (EGCs) are an abundant and powerful tracer of galaxy dynamics and formation, and their own formation and evolution is also a matter of extensive debate. The compact nature of globular clusters means that they are hard to spatially resolve and thus study outside the Local Group. In this work we have examined how well EGCs will be detectable in images from the Euclid telescope, using both simulated pre-launch images and the first early-release observations of the Fornax galaxy cluster. The Euclid Wide Survey will provide high-spatial resolution VIS imaging in the broad IE band as well as near-infrared photometry (YE, JE, and HE). We estimate that the galaxies within 100 Mpc in the footprint of the Euclid survey host around 830 000 EGCs of which about 350 000 are within the survey's detection limits. For about half of these EGCs, three infrared colours will be available as well. For any galaxy within 50Mpc the brighter half of its GC luminosity function will be detectable by the Euclid Wide Survey. The detectability of EGCs is mainly driven by the residual surface brightness of their host galaxy. We find that an automated machine-learning EGC-classification method based on real Euclid data of the Fornax galaxy cluster provides an efficient method to generate high purity and high completeness GC candidate catalogues. We confirm that EGCs are spatially resolved compared to pure point sources in VIS images of Fornax. Our analysis of both simulated and first on-sky data show that Euclid will increase the number of GCs accessible with high-resolution imaging substantially compared to previous surveys, and will permit the study of GCs in the outskirts of their hosts. Euclid is unique in enabling systematic studies of EGCs in a spatially unbiased and homogeneous manner and is primed to improve our understanding of many understudied aspects of GC astrophysics.

We forecast the expected population of active galactic nuclei (AGN) observable in the Euclid Wide Survey (EWS) and Euclid Deep Survey (EDS). Starting from an X-ray luminosity function (XLF) we generate volume-limited samples of the AGN expected in the survey footprints. Each AGN is assigned an SED appropriate for its X-ray luminosity and redshift, with perturbations sampled from empirical distributions. The photometric detectability of each AGN is assessed via mock observation of the assigned SED. We estimate 40 million AGN will be detectable in at least one band in the EWS and 0.24 million in the EDS, corresponding to surface densities of 2.8$\times$10$^{3}$ deg$^{-2}$ and 4.7$\times$10$^{3}$ deg$^{-2}$. Employing colour selection criteria on our simulated data we select a sample of 4.8$\times$10$^{6}$ (331 deg$^{-2}$) AGN in the EWS and 1.7$\times$10$^{4}$ (346 deg$^{-2}$) in the EDS, amounting to 10% and 8% of the AGN detectable in the EWS and EDS. Including ancillary Rubin/LSST bands improves the completeness and purity of AGN selection. These data roughly double the total number of selected AGN to comprise 21% and 15% of the detectable AGN in the EWS and EDS. The total expected sample of colour-selected AGN contains 6.0$\times$10$^{6}$ (74%) unobscured AGN and 2.1$\times$10$^{6}$ (26%) obscured AGN, covering $0.02 \leq z \lesssim 5.2$ and $43 \leq \log_{10} (L_{bol} / erg s^{-1}) \leq 47$. With this simple colour selection, expected surface densities are already comparable to the yield of modern X-ray and mid-infrared surveys of similar area. The relative uncertainty on our expectation for detectable AGN is 6.7% for the EWS and 12.5% for the EDS, driven by the uncertainty of the XLF.

We study the constraint on f(R) gravity that can be obtained by photometric primary probes of the Euclid mission. Our focus is the dependence of the constraint on the theoretical modelling of the nonlinear matter power spectrum. In the Hu-Sawicki f(R) gravity model, we consider four different predictions for the ratio between the power spectrum in f(R) and that in Lambda cold dark matter (Lambda CDM): a fitting formula, the halo model reaction approach, ReACT, and two emulators based on dark matter only N-body simulations, FORGE and e-Mantis. These predictions are added to the MontePython implementation to predict the angular power spectra for weak lensing (WL), photometric galaxy clustering, and their cross-correlation. By running Markov chain Monte Carlo, we compare constraints on parameters and investigate the bias of the recovered f(R) parameter if the data are created by a different model. For the pessimistic setting of WL, one-dimensional bias for the f(R) parameter, log10|fR0|, is found to be 0.5 sigma when FORGE is used to create the synthetic data with log10|fR0| = -5.301 and fitted by e-Mantis. The impact of baryonic physics on WL is studied by using a baryonification emulator, BCemu. For the optimistic setting, the f(R) parameter and two main baryonic parameters are well constrained despite the degeneracies among these parameters. However, the difference in the nonlinear dark matter prediction can be compensated for the adjustment of baryonic parameters, and the one-dimensional marginalised constraint on log10|fR0| is biased. This bias can be avoided in the pessimistic setting at the expense of weaker constraints. For the pessimistic setting, using the Lambda CDM synthetic data for WL, we obtain the prior-independent upper limit of log10|fR0| < -5.6. Finally, we implement a method to include theoretical errors to avoid the bias due to inaccuracies in the nonlinear matter power spectrum prediction.

Euclid is poised to make significant advances in the study of nearby galaxies in the local Universe. Here we present a first look at 6 galaxies observed for the Nearby Galaxy Showcase as part of the Euclid Early Release Observations acquired between August and November, 2023. These targets, 3 dwarf galaxies (HolmbergII, IC10, NGC6822) and 3 spirals (IC342, NGC2403, NGC6744), range in distance from about 0.5 Mpc to 8.8 Mpc. Our assessment of the surface brightness depths in the stacked Euclid images confirms previous estimates in 100 arcsec^2 regions of 1sigma=30.5 mag/arcsec^2 for VIS, but slightly deeper than previous estimates for NISP with 1sigma=29.2-29.4 mag/arcsec^2. By combining Euclid HE, YE, and IE into RGB images, we illustrate the large field-of-view covered by a single Reference Observing Sequence, together with exquisite detail on parsec scales in these nearby galaxies. Radial surface brightness and color profiles demonstrate galaxy colors in agreement with stellar population synthesis models. Standard stellar photometry selection techniques find approximately 1.3 million stars across the 6 galaxy fields. Euclid's resolved stellar photometry allows us to constrain the star-formation histories of these galaxies, by disentangling the distributions of young stars, as well as asymptotic giant branch and red giant branch stellar populations. We finally examine 2 galaxies individually for surrounding satellite systems. Our analysis of the ensemble of dwarf satellites around NGC6744 reveals a new galaxy, EDwC1, a nucleated dwarf spheroidal at the end of a spiral arm. Our new census of the globular clusters around NGC2403 yields 9 new star-cluster candidates, 8 of which with colors indicative of evolved stellar populations. In summary, our investigation of the 6 Showcase galaxies demonstrates that Euclid is a powerful probe of the anatomy of nearby galaxies [abridged].

Context. Cluster cosmology can benefit from combining multi-wavelength studies. In turn, these studies benefit from a characterisation of the correlation coefficients among different mass-observable relations. Aims. In this work, we aim to provide information on the scatter, skewness, and covariance of various mass-observable relations in galaxy clusters in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. This information will help future analyses improve the general approach to accretion histories and projection effects, as well as to model mass-observable relations for cosmology studies. Methods. We identified galaxy clusters in Magneticum Box2b simulations with masses of M-200c > 10(14) M-circle dot at redshifts of z = 0.24 and z = 0.90. Our analysis included Euclid-derived properties such as richness, stellar mass, lensing mass, and concentration. Additionally, we investigated complementary multi-wavelength data, including X-ray luminosity, integrated Compton-y parameter, gas mass, and temperature. We then examined the impact of projection effects on mass-observable residuals and correlations. Results. We find that at intermediate redshift (z = 0.24), projection effects have the greatest impact of lensing concentration, richness, and gas mass in terms of the scatter and skewness of the log-residuals of scaling relations. The contribution of projection effects can be significant enough to boost a spurious hot- versus cold-baryon correlations and consequently hide underlying correlations due to halo accretion histories. At high redshift (z = 0.9), the richness has a much lower scatter (of log-residuals), while the quantity that is most impacted by projection effects is the lensing mass. The lensing concentration reconstruction, in particular, is affected by deviations of the reduced-shear profile shape from that derived using a Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) profile; the amount of interlopers in the line of sight, on the other hand, is not as important.

We present the first analysis of the Early Release Observations (ERO) program that targets fields around two lensing clusters, Abell 2390 and Abell 2764. We use imaging data from the Visible instrument (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) to produce photometric catalogs for a total of $ 500\,000$ objects. The imaging data reach a typical depth of $5\ in the range 25.1--25.4 AB in the NISP bands and 27.1--27.3 AB in the VIS band. Using the Lyman-break method in combination with photometric redshifts, we searched for high-redshift galaxies. We identified $30$ Lyman-break galaxy (LBG) candidates at $z>6$ and 139 extremely red sources (ERSs), most of which likely lie at lower redshift. The VIS imaging is deeper than the NISP imaging, which means that we can routinely identify high-redshift Lyman-break galaxies at about a magnitude of 3, which reduces contamination by brown dwarf stars and low-redshift galaxies. The difficulty of spatially resolving most of these sources in 0 $ imaging means that it is difficult to distinguish between galaxies and quasars. Spectroscopic follow-up campaigns of these bright sources will help us to constrain the bright end of the ultraviolet galaxy luminosity function and the quasar luminosity function at $z>6$, and it will constrain the physical nature of these objects. Additionally, we performed a combined strong- and weak-lensing analysis of A2390, and we show that will contribute to constraining the virial mass of galaxy clusters better. We also identify optical and near-infrared counterparts of known $z>0.6$ clusters in these data. These counterparts exhibit strong-lensing features. This establishes that can characterize high-redshift clusters. Finally, we provide a glimpse of the ability of to map the intracluster light out to larger radii than current facilities, which enables us to understand the cluster assembly history better and to map the dark matter distribution. This initial dataset illustrates the diverse spectrum of legacy science that is possible with the survey.

The Euclid ERO programme targeted the Perseus cluster of galaxies, gathering deep data in the central region of the cluster over 0.7 square degree, corresponding to approximately 0.25 r_200. The data set reaches a point-source depth of IE=28.0 (YE, JE, HE = 25.3) AB magnitudes at 5 sigma with a 0.16" and 0.48" FWHM, and a surface brightness limit of 30.1 (29.2) mag per square arcsec. The exceptional depth and spatial resolution of this wide-field multi-band data enable the simultaneous detection and characterisation of both bright and low surface brightness galaxies, along with their globular cluster systems, from the optical to the NIR. This study advances beyond previous analyses of the cluster and enables a range of scientific investigations summarised here. We derive the luminosity and stellar mass functions (LF and SMF) of the Perseus cluster in the Euclid IE band, thanks to supplementary u,g,r,i,z and Halpha data from the CFHT. We adopt a catalogue of 1100 dwarf galaxies, detailed in the corresponding ERO paper. We identify all other sources in the Euclid images and obtain accurate photometric measurements using AutoProf or AstroPhot for 138 bright cluster galaxies, and SourceExtractor for half a million compact sources. Cluster membership for the bright sample is determined by calculating photometric redshifts with Phosphoros. Our LF and SMF are the deepest recorded for the Perseus cluster, highlighting the groundbreaking capabilities of the Euclid telescope. Both the LF and SMF fit a Schechter plus Gaussian model. The LF features a dip at M(IE)=-19 and a faint-end slope of alpha_S = -1.2 to -1.3. The SMF displays a low-mass-end slope of alpha_S = -1.2 to -1.35. These observed slopes are flatter than those predicted for dark matter halos in cosmological simulations, offering significant insights for models of galaxy formation and evolution.

Cosmic shear is a powerful probe of cosmological models and the transition from current Stage-III surveys such as the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) to the increased area and redshift range of Stage IV surveys such as Euclid will significantly increase the precision of weak lensing analyses. However, with increasing precision, the accuracy of model assumptions needs to be evaluated. In this study, we quantify the impact of the correlated clustering of weak lensing source galaxies with the surrounding large-scale structure, known as source-lens clustering (SLC), which is commonly neglected. We include the impact of realistic scatter in photometric redshift estimates, which impacts the assignment of galaxies to tomographic bins and increases the SLC. For this, we use simulated cosmological datasets with realistically distributed galaxies and measure shear correlation functions for both clustered and uniformly distributed source galaxies. Cosmological analyses are performed for both scenarios to quantify the impact of SLC on parameter inference for a KiDS-like and a Euclid-like setting. We find for Stage III surveys such as KiDS, SLC has a minor impact when accounting for nuisance parameters for intrinsic alignments and shifts of tomographic bins, as these nuisance parameters absorb the e ffect of SLC, thus changing their original meaning. For KiDS (Euclid), the inferred intrinsic alignment amplitude A(IA) changes from 0.11(-0.46)(+0.44)(0.009(-0.080)(+0.079)) for data without SLC to 0.28(-0.44)(+0.42)(0.022(-0.082)(+0.081)) with SLC. However, fixed nuisance parameters lead to shifts in S-8 and Omega(m), emphasizing the need for including SLC in the modelling. For Euclid we find that sigma(8), Omega(m), and w(0) are shifted by 0.19, 0.12, and 0.12 sigma, respectively, when including free nuisance parameters, and by 0.20, 0.16, and 0.32 sigma when fixing the nuisance parameters. Consequently, SLC on its own has only a small impact on the inferred parameter inference when using uninformative priors for nuisance parameters. However, SLC might conspire with the breakdown of other modelling assumptions, such as magnification bias or source obscuration, which could collectively exert a more pronounced e ffect on inferred parameters.

The Euclid mission will measure cosmological parameters with unprecedented precision. To distinguish between cosmological models, it is essential to generate realistic mock observables from cosmological simulations that were run in both the standard Lambda-cold-dark-matter (Lambda CDM) paradigm and in many non-standard models beyond Lambda CDM. We present the scientific results from a suite of cosmological N-body simulations using non-standard models including dynamical dark energy, k-essence, interacting dark energy, modified gravity, massive neutrinos, and primordial non-Gaussianities. We investigate how these models affect the large-scale-structure formation and evolution in addition to providing synthetic observables that can be used to test and constrain these models with Euclid data. We developed a custom pipeline based on the Rockstar halo finder and the nbodykit large-scale structure toolkit to analyse the particle output of non-standard simulations and generate mock observables such as halo and void catalogues, mass density fields, and power spectra in a consistent way. We compare these observables with those from the standard Lambda CDM model and quantify the deviations. We find that non-standard cosmological models can leave large imprints on the synthetic observables that we have generated. Our results demonstrate that non-standard cosmological N-body simulations provide valuable insights into the physics of dark energy and dark matter, which is essential to maximising the scientific return of Euclid.

The Euclid mission of the European Space Agency will provide weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering surveys that can be used to constrain the standard cosmological model and its extensions, with an opportunity to test the properties of dark matter beyond the minimal cold dark matter paradigm. We present forecasts from the combination of the Euclid weak lensing and photometric galaxy clustering data on the parameters describing four interesting and representative non-minimal dark matter models: a mixture of cold and warm dark matter relics; unstable dark matter decaying either into massless or massive relics; and dark matter undergoing feeble interactions with relativistic relics. We modelled these scenarios at the level of the non-linear matter power spectrum using emulators trained on dedicated N-body simulations. We used a mock Euclid likelihood and Monte Carlo Markov chains to fit mock data and infer error bars on dark matter parameters marginalised over other parameters. We find that the Euclid photometric probe (alone or in combination with cosmic microwave background data from the Planck satellite) will be sensitive to the effect of each of the four dark matter models considered here. The improvement will be particularly spectacular for decaying and interacting dark matter models. With Euclid, the bounds on some dark matter parameters can improve by up to two orders of magnitude compared to current limits. We discuss the dependence of predicted uncertainties on different assumptions: the inclusion of photometric galaxy clustering data, the minimum angular scale taken into account, and modelling of baryonic feedback effects. We conclude that the Euclid mission will be able to measure quantities related to the dark sector of particle physics with unprecedented sensitivity. This will provide important information for model building in high-energy physics. Any hint of a deviation from the minimal cold dark matter paradigm would have profound implications for cosmology and particle physics.

The Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) on board the satellite provides multiband photometry and $R slitless grism spectroscopy in the 950--2020\,nm wavelength range. In this reference article, we illuminate the background of NISP's functional and calibration requirements, describe the instrument's integral components, and provide all its key properties. We also sketch the processes needed to understand how NISP operates and is calibrated as well as its technical potentials and limitations. Links to articles providing more details and the technical background are included. The NISP's 16 H2RG detectors with a plate scale of $ deliver a field of view of 0.57\,deg$^2$. In photometric mode, NISP reaches a limiting magnitude of sim \,24.5\,AB\,mag in three photometric exposures of about 100\,s in exposure time for point sources and with a S/N of five. For spectroscopy, NISP's point-source sensitivity is a SNR = 3.5 detection of an emission line with flux sim \,$2 $ integrated over two resolution elements of 13.4\ in 3times 560\,s grism exposures at 1.6\ (redshifted Halpha ). Our calibration includes on-ground and in-flight characterisation and monitoring of the pixel-based detector baseline, dark current, non-linearity, and sensitivity to guarantee a relative photometric accuracy better than 1.5 and a relative spectrophotometry better than 0.7. The wavelength calibration must be accurate to 5\ or better. The NISP is the state-of-the-art instrument in the near-infrared for all science beyond small areas available from HST and JWST -- and it represents an enormous advance from any existing instrumentation due to its combination of field size and high throughput of telescope and instrument. During six-year survey covering 14\,000\,deg$^2$ of extragalactic sky, NISP will be the backbone in determining distances of more than a billion galaxies. Its near-infrared data will become a rich reference imaging and spectroscopy data set for the coming decades.