Related papers: Topological Defects in Gravitational Lensing Shear…
Typical applications of gravitational lensing use the properties of electromagnetic or gravitational waves to infer the geometry through which those waves propagate. Nevertheless, the optical fields themselves - as opposed to their…
It is now routine to measure the weak gravitational lensing shear signal from the mean ellipticity of distant galaxies. However, conversion between ellipticity and shear assumes local linearity of the lensing potential (ie that the spatial…
We derive the metric of a circular chiral vorton in the weak field limit. The object is self-supporting by means of its chiral current. A conical singularity with deficit angle, identical to that of straight string with the same linear mass…
Topological defects are singularities within a field that cannot be removed by continuous transformations. The definition of these irregularities requires an ordered reference configuration, calling into question whether they exist in…
In a general-relativistic spacetime (Lorentzian manifold), gravitational lensing can be characterized by a lens map, in analogy to the lens map of the quasi-Newtonian approximation formalism. The lens map is defined on the celestial sphere…
In these lectures I give an overview of gravitational lensing, concentrating on theoretical aspects, including derivations of some of the important results. Topics covered include the determination of surface mass densities of intervening…
The weak field limit of scalar tensor theories of gravity is discussed in view of conformal transformations. Specifically, we consider how physical quantities, like gravitational potentials derived in the Newtonian approximation for the…
We infer gravitational lensing shear and convergence fields from galaxy ellipticity catalogs under a spatial process prior for the lensing potential. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm with simulated Gaussian-distributed…
One of the most powerful techniques to study the dark sector of the Universe is weak gravitational lensing. In practice, to infer the reduced shear, weak lensing measures galaxy shapes, which are the consequence of both the intrinsic…
We demonstrate topological defect lasers in a GaAs membrane with embedded InAs quantum dots. By introducing a disclination to a square-lattice of elliptical air holes, we obtain spatially confined optical resonances with high quality…
A gravitational potential has the spherical property when the field outside any uniform spherical shell is indistinguishable from that of a point mass at the center. We present the general potentials that possess this property on constant…
When the gravitational lensing of the large-scale structure is calculated from a cosmological model a few assumptions enter: $(i)$ one assumes that the photons follow unperturbed background geodesics, which is usually referred to as the…
In amorphous materials, plasticity is localized and occurs as shear transformations. It was recently shown by Wu et al. that these shear transformations can be predicted by applying topological defect concepts developed for liquid crystals…
We study a general elliptical potential of the form $\psi(x^2+y^2/q^2)~ (0<q\le 1)$ plus an additional shear (with an arbitrary direction) as models for the observed quadruple lenses. It is shown that a minimum additional shear is needed…
We investigate the effect of weak gravitational lensing in the limit of small angular scales where projected galaxy clustering is strongly nonlinear. This is the regime likely to be probed by future weak lensing surveys. We use…
The abundance of peaks in weak gravitational lensing maps is a potentially powerful cosmological tool, complementary to measurements of the shear power spectrum. We study peaks detected directly in shear maps, rather than convergence maps,…
While most strong-gravitational-lensing systems may be roughly modelled by a single massive object between the source and the observer, in the details all the structures near the light path contribute to the observed images. These…
Hierarchical theories of structure formation predict that clusters of galaxies should be embedded in a web like structure, with filaments emanating from them to large distances. The amount of mass contained within such filaments near a…
Weak gravitational lensing measurements based on photometry are limited by shape noise, the variance in the unknown unlensed orientations of the source galaxies. If the source is a disk galaxy with a well-ordered velocity field, however,…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…