We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the solar system, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a large, wide-field ground-based system designed to obtain repeated images covering the sky visible from Cerro Pachón in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg 2 field of view, a 3.2-gigapixel camera, and six filters (ugrizy) covering the wavelength range 320-1050 nm. The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. About 90% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode that will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg 2 region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 yr of operations and will yield a co-added map to r∼27.5. These data will result in databases including about 32 trillion observations of 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and they will serve the majority of the primary science programs. The remaining 10% of the observing time will be allocated to special projects such as Very Deep and Very Fast time domain surveys, whose details are currently under discussion. We illustrate how the LSST science drivers led to these choices of system parameters, and we describe the expected data products and their characteristics.

We use the Millennium Simulation (MS) to study the statistics of Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) halo concentrations at z= 0. Our results confirm that the average halo concentration declines monotonically with mass; the concentration–mass relation is well fitted by a power law over three decades in mass, up to the most massive objects that form in a ΛCDM universe (∼ 1015 h−1 M⊙). This is in clear disagreement with the predictions of the model proposed by Bullock et al. for these rare objects, and agrees better with the original predictions of Navarro, Frenk & White. The large volume surveyed, together with the unprecedented numerical resolution of the MS, allows us to estimate with confidence the distribution of concentrations and, consequently, the abundance of systems with unusual properties. About one in a hundred cluster haloes (M200≳ 3 × 1014 h−1 M⊙) have concentrations exceeding c200= 7.5, a result that may be useful in interpreting the likelihood of unusually strong massive gravitational lenses, such as Abell 1689, in the ΛCDM cosmogony. A similar fraction of about 1 per cent of galaxy‐sized haloes (M200∼ 1012 h−1 M⊙) have c200 < 4.5 and this could be relevant to models that attempt to reconcile the ΛCDM cosmology with rotation curves of low surface brightness galaxies by appealing to haloes of unexpectedly low concentration. We find that halo concentrations are independent of spin once haloes manifestly out of equilibrium have been removed from the sample. Compared to their relaxed brethren, the concentrations of out‐of‐equilibrium haloes tend to be lower and have more scatter, while their spins tend to be higher. A number of previously noted trends within the halo population are induced primarily by these properties of unrelaxed systems. Finally, we compare the result of predicting halo concentrations using the mass assembly history of the main progenitor with predictions based on simple arguments regarding the assembly time of all progenitors. The latter are typically as good or better than the former, suggesting that halo concentration depends not only on the evolutionary path of a halo's main progenitor, but on how and when all of its constituents collapsed to form non‐linear objects.

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