Related papers: Gravitational microlensing as a probe for dark mat…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
Mass clumps in gravitational lens galaxies can perturb lensed images in characteristic ways. Strong lens flux ratios have been used to constrain the amount of dark matter substructure in lens galaxies, and various other observables have…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…
The magnifications of the images in a strong gravitational lens system are sensitive to small mass clumps in the lens potential; this effect has been used to infer the amount of substructure in galaxy dark matter halos. I study the theory…
Gravitational lensing describes the bending of the trajectories of light and gravitational waves due to the gravitational potential of a massive object. Strong lensing by galaxies can create multiple images with different overall…
We investigate the extended source size effects on gravitational lensing in which a lens consists of a smooth potential and small mass clumps (``substructure lensing''). We first consider a lens model that consists of a clump modeled as a…
Microlensing near macro-caustics is a complex phenomenon in which swarms of micro-images produced by micro-caustics form on both sides of a macro-critical curve. Recent discoveries of highly magnified images of individual stars in massive…
Gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters has emerged as a powerful tool to probe the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm of structure formation in the Universe. Despite the remarkable explanatory power of CDM on large scales, tensions…
Gravitational microlensing of planetary-mass objects (or "nanolensing", as it has been termed) can be used to probe the distribution of mass in a galaxy that is acting as a gravitational lens. Microlensing and nanolensing light curve…
A fraction of light scalar dark matter, especially axions, may organize into Bose-Einstein condensates, gravitationally bound clumps, "boson stars", and be present in large number in galactic halos today. We compute the expected number of…
Magnification of total image fluxes is typically considered a defining feature of gravitational microlensing. In contrast, I will show that nonminimal couplings to gravity can generate regions of negative gravitational potential curvature,…
When there is more than one source of light along the line of sight to a gravitationally lensed object, the characteristics of the observed light curve are influenced by the presence of the light that is not lensed. In this paper we develop…
Cold dark matter (CDM) constitutes most of the matter in the Universe. The interplay between dark and luminous matter in dense cosmic environments like galaxy clusters is studied theoretically using cosmological simulations. Observed…
In the smooth mass distribution model, the critical curve represents a line with magnification divergence on the image plane in a strong gravitational lensing system. Considering the microlensing effects caused by discrete masses, the…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
Gravitational microlensing is a key probe of the nature of dark matter and its distribution on the smallest scales. For many practical purposes, confronting theory to observation requires to model the probability that a light source is…
We investigate gravitational microlensing of point-like lenses surrounded by diffuse gas clouds. Besides gravitational bending, one must also consider refraction and absorption phenomena. According to the cloud density, the light curves may…
Recently, Meneghetti et al. reported an excess of small-scale gravitational lenses in galaxy clusters. We study its implications for self-interacting dark matter (SIDM), compared with standard cold dark matter (CDM). We design controlled…
Microlensing of extragalactic sources, in particular the probability of significant amplifications, is a potentially powerful probe of the abundance of compact objects outside the halo of the Milky Way. Accurate experimental constraints…
A galaxy cluster acts as a cosmic telescope over background galaxies but also as a cosmic microscope of the lens imperfections. The diverging magnification of lensing caustics enhances the microlensing effect of substructure present within…