Related papers: Shape, shear & flexion: An analytic flexion formal…
Density fluctuations in the matter distribution lead to distortions of the images of distant galaxies through weak gravitational lensing effects. This provides an efficient probe of the cosmological parameters and of the density field. In…
Strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics provide two complementary and orthogonal constraints on the density profiles of galaxies. Based on spherically symmetric, scale-free, mass models, it is shown that the combination of both…
Numerical studies on the imaging and caustic properties of the singular isothermal sphere (SIS) under a wide range of external shear (from 0.0 to 2.0) are presented. Using a direct inverse-mapping formula for this lens system (Lee 2003), we…
We present a simulation analysis of weak gravitational lensing flexion and shear measurement using shapelet decomposition, and identify differences between flexion and shear measurement noise in deep survey data. Taking models of galaxies…
We investigate strong lensing by non-singular finite isothermal ellipsoids taking into account the influence of the matter along the line of sight and in the close lens vicinity. We compare three descriptions of light propagation: the full…
We propose a new technique to directly measure the shapes of dark matter halos of galaxies using weak gravitational lensing. Extending the standard galaxy-galaxy lensing method, we show that the shape parameters of the mass distribution of…
In Paper I we studied the theory of gravitational microlensing for a planar distribution of point masses. In this second paper, we extend the analysis to a three-dimensional lens distribution. First we study the lensing properties of…
The profile of Navarro, Frenk, and White (the NFW profile), which was derived from the {\it N}-body simulations of cold dark-matter halos, is a strong candidate for a galaxy or cluster profile. In order to check the usability of the NFW…
The surface mass density of a cluster of galaxies, and thus its total mass, can be estimated from its lens magnification. The magnification can be determined from the variation in number counts of its background galaxies. In the weak…
We investigate the influence of the inner profile of lens objects on gravitational lens statistics taking into account of the effect of magnification bias and both the evolution and the scatter of halo profiles. We take the dark halos as…
Inhomogeneities along the line of sight in strong gravitational lensing distort the images produced, in an effect called shear. If measurable, this shear may provide independent constraints on cosmological parameters, complementary to…
Mass determinations from gravitational lensing shear and the higher order estimator flexion are both subject to the mass sheet degeneracy. Mass sheet degeneracy refers to a transformation that leaves the reduced shear and flexion invariant.…
We present new results on the gravitational lensing shear and magnification power spectra obtained from numerical simulations of a flat cosmology with a cosmological constant. These results are of considerable interest since both the shear…
This paper details a description of the pattern of galaxy image distortion over the entire sky caused by the gravitational lensing which is the result of large scale inhomogeneities in our universe. We present a tensor spherical harmonic…
Weak gravitational lensing flexions are a kind of weak lensing distortion which are defined as the spin 1 and spin 3 combinations of the third order derivatives of gravitational lensing potential. Since the shear has spin 2 combination of…
The gravitational lensing equations for convergence, potential, shear, and flexion are simple in polar coordinates and separate under a multipole expansion once the shear and flexion spinors are rotated into a ``tangential'' basis. We use…
We develop a non--perturbative method that yields analytical expressions for the deflection angle of light in a general static and spherically symmetric metric. It is an improvement on a method previously devised by the authors, and…
The laws of geometric optics and their corrections are derived for scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational waves propagating in generic curved spacetimes. Local peeling-type results are obtained, where different components of…
The statistics of gravitational lensing can provide us with a very powerful probe of the mass distribution of matter in the universe. By comparing predicted strong lensing probabilities with observations, we can test the mass distribution…
[Abridged] Many current and future astronomical surveys will rely on samples of strong gravitational lens systems to draw conclusions about galaxy mass distributions. We use a new strong lensing pipeline (presented in Paper I of this…