Related papers: A Mathematical Theory of Stochastic Microlensing I…
The phenomenon of cosmic shear, or distortion of images of distant sources unaccompanied by magnification, is an effective way of probing the content and state of the foreground Universe, because light rays do not have to pass through mass…
For differences between means of continuous data from independent groups, the customary scale-free measure of effect is the standardized mean difference (SMD). To justify use of SMD, one should be reasonably confident that the group-level…
We present new tests to identify stationary position-dependent additive shear biases in weak gravitational lensing data sets. These tests are important diagnostics for currently ongoing and planned cosmic shear surveys, as such biases…
Current and future imaging surveys will measure cosmic shear with a statistical precision that demands a deeper understanding of potential systematic biases in galaxy shape measurements than has been achieved to date. We investigate the…
Gravitational microlensing surveys target very dense stellar fields in the local group. As a consequence the microlensed source stars are often blended with nearby unresolved stars. The presence of `blending' is a cause of major uncertainty…
Telescope Point Spread Function (PSF) quality is critical for realising the potential of cosmic weak lensing observations to constrain dark energy and test General Relativity. In this paper we use quantitative weak gravitational lensing…
In this paper, we assemble a well-defined sample of early-type gravitational lenses extracted from a large collection of 158 systems, and use the redshift distribution of galactic-scale lenses to test the standard cosmological model…
Weak gravitational lensing allows one to reconstruct the spatial distribution of the projected mass density across the sky. These "mass maps" provide a powerful tool for studying cosmology as they probe both luminous and dark matter. In…
The current modelling of single microlensing light curves neglects the possibility that only a fraction of the light is due to the lensed star, the remaining being due to a close, unresolved blend, which may be related or unrelated to the…
The main aim of microlensing experiments is to evaluate the mean mass of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) and the mass fraction of the Galactic halo made by this type of dark matter. Statistical analysis shows that by considering a…
Despite the suspected binarity for a significant fraction of Galactic lenses, the current photometric surveys detected binary microlensing events only for a small fraction of the total events. The detection efficiency is especially low for…
Pixel lensing, gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars, is potentially much more sensitive and much more widely applicable than is generally recognized. I give explicit expressions for the pixel noise induced by a time-variable PSF,…
We study the biasing relation between dark-matter halos or galaxies and the underlying mass distribution, using cosmological $N$-body simulations in which galaxies are modelled via semi-analytic recipes. The nonlinear, stochastic biasing is…
The mathematical theory of gravitational lensing has revealed many generic and global properties. Beginning with multiple imaging, we review Morse-theoretic image counting formulas and lower bound results, and complex-algebraic upper bounds…
We study the morphology of convergence maps by perturbatively reconstructing their Minkowski Functionals (MFs). We present a systematics study using a set of three generalised skew-spectra as a function of source redshift and smoothing…
The stochastic density functional theory (DFT) [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 106402 (2013)] is a valuable linear scaling approach to Kohn-Sham DFT that does not rely on the sparsity of the density matrix. Linear (and often sub-linear) scaling is…
With the availability of thousands of type Ia supernovae in the near future the magnitude scatter induced by lensing will become a major issue as it affects parameter estimation. Current N-body simulations are too time consuming to be…
We study a stochastic optimization problem in which the sampling distribution depends on the decision variable, and the available samples are generated through an iterate-dependent Markov chain. Such settings arise naturally in problems…
Photometric redshift estimation is an indispensable tool of precision cosmology. One problem that plagues the use of this tool in the era of large-scale sky surveys is that the bright galaxies that are selected for spectroscopic observation…
Gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics provide two complementary, nearly orthogonal, constraints on the mass distribution of early-type lens galaxies. This allows the luminous and dark-matter distribution in higher-redshift (z>0.1)…