Related papers: Laser Guide Stars for Extremely Large Telescopes: …
Near-diffraction limited imaging and spectroscopy in the visible on large (8-10 meter) class telescopes has proved to be beyond the capabilities of current adaptive optics technologies, even when using laser guide stars. The need for high…
The largest uncertainty on measurements of dark energy using type Ia supernovae is presently due to systematics from photometry; specifically to the relative uncertainty on photometry as a function of wavelength in the optical spectrum. We…
(Abr.) Laser guide stars employed at astronomical observatories provide artificial wavefront reference sources to help correct (in part) the impact of atmospheric turbulence on astrophysical observations. Following the recent commissioning…
As a major component of the LAMOST Galactic surveys, the LAMOST Spectroscopic Survey of the Galactic Anti-centre (LSS-GAC) aims to survey a significant volume of the Galactic thin/thick discs and halo for a contiguous sky area of over 3,400…
Spectral hole burning reduces sodium laser guide star efficiency. Due to photon recoil, atoms that are initially resonant with the single-frequency laser get Doppler shifted out of resonance, which reduces the return flux. Frequency-chirped…
Infrared observations of the Galactic center (GC) provide a unique opportunity to study stellar and bow-shock polarization effects in a dusty environment. The goals of this work are to present new Ks- and Lp-band polarimetry on an…
Stacked lensing is a powerful means of measuring the average mass distribution around large-scale structure tracers. There are two stacked lensing estimators used in the literature, denoted as $\Delta\Sigma$ and $\gamma_+$, which are…
This paper extends the method introduced in Rivi et al. (2016b) to measure galaxy ellipticities in the visibility domain for radio weak lensing surveys. In that paper we focused on the development and testing of the method for the simple…
We propose a tunable resonant sensor to detect gravitational waves in the frequency range of 50-300 kHz using optically trapped and cooled dielectric microspheres or micro-discs. The technique we describe can exceed the sensitivity of…
We investigate the feasibility of measuring weak gravitational lensing using 21cm intensity mapping with special emphasis on the performance of the planned Square Kilometre Array (SKA). We find that the current design for SKA-Mid should be…
The ingot wavefront sensor (I-WFS) has been proposed, for ELT-like apertures, as a possible pupil plane WFS, to cope with the geometrical characteristics of a laser guide star (LGS). Within the study and development of such a WFS, on-going…
Weak lensing is emerging as a powerful observational tool to constrain cosmological models, but is at present limited by an incomplete understanding of many sources of systematic error. Many of these errors are multiplicative and depend on…
We have designed and tested an automated simple setup for quickly measuring the profile and spot size of a Gaussian laser beam using three cost-affordable light sensors. Two profiling techniques were implemented: imaging for the CMOS 2D…
We simulate the effects of gravitational lensing on the source count of high redshift galaxies as projected to be observed by the Hubble Frontier Fields program and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the near future. Taking the mass…
The advancement in sensitivity and field of view of next-generation wide-field survey telescopes requires astrometric measurements with high precision, even in the presence of significant geometric distortions. To address this challenge, we…
The sodium laser guide star (sLGS) adaptive optics (AO) system has become an essential component for large ground-based optical/infrared telescope. The performance of the AO system can be significantly hindered if the on-sky spot profile of…
Wavefront sensors encode phase information of an incoming wavefront into an intensity pattern that can be measured on a camera. Several kinds of wavefront sensors (WFS) are used in astronomical adaptive optics. Amongst them, Fourier-based…
Gravitational lensing is an important prediction of general relativity, providing both its test and a tool to detect faint but amplified sources and to measure masses of lenses. For some applications (e.g. testing the theory), a point…
Many lens surveys have hitherto used observations of large samples of background sources to select the small minority which are multiply imaged by lensing galaxies along the line of sight. Recently surveys such as SLACS and OLS have…
The Multiconjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) for ESO-Very Large Telescopes (VLT) will demonstrate on sky the MultiConjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) technique. In this paper the laboratory tests relative to the first preliminary…