Related papers: A new weak lensing shear analysis method using ell…
In the very near future, weak lensing surveys will map the projected density of the universe in an unbiased way over large regions of the sky. In order to interpret the results of studies it is helpful to develop an understanding of the…
We present the first measurement of weak lensing by large-scale structure on 1-4 degree scales based on the FIRST Radio Survey, a quarter-sky, 20-cm survey produced with the NRAO Very Large Array (VLA). The large angular scales provide an…
We develop an algorithm for the reconstruction of the two-dimensional mass distribution of a gravitational lens from the observable distortion of background galaxies. From the measured reduced shear, the lens mapping is obtained, from which…
The measurement of cosmic shear using weak gravitational lensing is a challenging task that involves a number of complicated procedures. We study in detail the systematic errors in the measurement of weak lensing Minkowski Functionals…
We present a derivation of a generalized optimally-weighted estimator for the weak lensing magnification signal, including a calculation of errors. With this estimator, we present a local method for optimally estimating the local effects of…
We seek to understand the impact on shape estimators obtained from circular and elliptical shapelet models under two realistic conditions: (a) only a limited number of shapelet modes is available for the model, and (b) the intrinsic…
A likelihood-based method for measuring weak gravitational lensing shear in deep galaxy surveys is described and applied to the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). CFHTLenS comprises 154 sq deg of multicolour…
The unknown intrinsic shape of source galaxies is one of the largest uncertainties of weak gravitational lensing (WL). It results in the so-called shape noise at the level of $\sigma_\epsilon^{\mathrm{WL}} \approx 0.26$, whereas the shear…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys are rapidly becoming important tools to probe directly the mass density fluctuations in the universe and its background dynamics. Earlier studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of…
Point estimators for the shearing of galaxy images induced by gravitational lensing involve a complex inverse problem in the presence of noise, pixelization, and model uncertainties. We present a probabilistic forward modeling approach to…
Standard cosmological weak lensing analyses using cosmic shear are inevitably sensitive to small-scale, non-linear clustering from low-redshift structures. The need to adequately model the clustering of matter on this non-linear regime,…
We study a possibility to use the octopole moment of gravitationally lensed images as a direct measure of the third-order weak gravitational lensing effect, or the gravitational flexion. It turns out that there is a natural relation between…
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter…
We propose a new mass-mapping algorithm, specifically designed to recover small-scale information from a combination of gravitational shear and flexion. Including flexion allows us to supplement the shear on small scales in order to…
Galaxy-galaxy weak lensing provides a powerful means of measuring the average matter distribution around lens galaxies -- i.e., the galaxy bias relation. Properly accounting for the spin-2 nature of weak lensing distortions, we develop a…
The sensitivity and wide area reached by ongoing and future wide-field optical surveys allows for the detection of an increasing number of galaxy clusters uniquely through their weak lensing (WL) signal. This motivates the development of…
Using data from the HST Medium Deep Survey, a long-term Key Project, together with generically similar archived data, we have discovered evidence for weak gravitational `shear' of background field galaxies (I = 22 -- 26) in the vicinity of…
We investigate the weak lensing shear due to dark matter galaxy halos whose mass distributions, as projected on the sky, are nearly elliptical. The shear pattern due to these halos is anisotropic about the lens centers and we quantify the…
One of the primary limiting sources of systematic uncertainty in forthcoming weak lensing measurements is systematic uncertainty in the quantitative relationship between the distortions due to gravitational lensing and the measurable…
In this work we investigate the effect on weak-lensing shear and convergence measurements due to distortions from the Lorentz boost induced by our Galaxy's motion. While no ellipticity is induced in an image from the Lorentz boost to first…