Related papers: A Way Forward for Cosmic Shear: Monte-Carlo Contro…
Weak lensing provides a direct measure of the distribution of mass in the universe, and is therefore a uniquely powerful probe of dark matter. Weak lensing can also be used to measure the twin phenomenon of dark energy, via its effect upon…
Stage-IV photometric galaxy surveys are designed to measure the position and shapes of billions of galaxies. Their aim is to characterise the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe using galaxy clustering and weak gravitational…
The wealth of incoming and future cosmological observations will allow us to map out the structure and evolution of the observable universe to an unprecedented level of precision. Among these observations is the weak gravitational lensing…
We present a three dimensional cosmic shear analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey, the largest ever optical imaging program performed in space. We have measured the shapes of galaxies for the tell-tale distortions caused by…
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…
Weak gravitational lensing is one of the key probes of the cosmological model, dark energy, and dark matter, providing insight into both the cosmic expansion history and large scale structure growth history. Taking into account a broad…
Weak lensing can be observed through a number of effects on the images of distant galaxies; their shapes are sheared, their sizes and fluxes (magnitudes) are magnified and their positions on the sky are modified by the lensing field. Galaxy…
Studies of weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structures require the measurement of the distortions introduced to the shapes of distant galaxies at the few percent level by anisotropic light deflection along the line of sight. To…
The nature of the dark matter remains a mystery. The possibility of an unstable dark matter particle decaying to invisible daughter particles has been explored many times in the past few decades. Meanwhile, weak gravitational lensing shear…
Weak gravitational lensing (WL) causes distortions of galaxy images and probes massive structures on large scales, allowing us to understand the late-time evolution of the Universe. One way to extract the cosmological information from WL is…
We explore the stability of the variance and skewness of the cosmic gravitational convergence field, using two different approaches: first we simulate a whole MEGACAM survey (100 sq. degrees). The reconstructed mass map, obtained from a…
Measurement of the gravitational distortion of images of distant galaxies is rapidly becoming established as a powerful probe of the dark mass distribution in clusters of galaxies. With the advent of large mosaics of CCD's these methods…
This paper presents the first application of 3D cosmic shear to a wide-field weak lensing survey. 3D cosmic shear is a technique that analyses weak lensing in three dimensions using a spherical harmonic approach, and does not bin data in…
Weak gravitational lensing induces flux dependent fluctuations in the observed galaxy number density distribution. This cosmic magnification (magnification bias) effect in principle enables lensing reconstruction alternative to cosmic shear…
Cosmic shear leads to a correlation of the observed ellipticities of galaxies, an effect which is used to place constraints on cosmological parameters, and to explore the evolution of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. However, a…
Cosmic shear probes the distribution of dark matter via gravitational lensing of distant, background galaxies. We describe our cosmic shear survey consisting of deep blank fields observed with the Keck II telescope. We have found biases in…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-shear regions are directly…
This paper reviews statistical methods recently developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that the…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys measure the distortion of the image of distant sources due to the deflections of light rays by the fluctuations of the gravitational potential along the line of sight. Since they probe the non-linear…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is an invaluable cosmological tool given that most of the energy density of the concordance cosmology is invisible. Several large ground-based imaging surveys will attempt to measure this effect over…