Related papers: Beyond lensing by the cosmological constant
While the Hubble constant can be derived from observable time delays between images of lensed quasars, the result is often highly sensitive to assumptions and systematic uncertainties in the lensing model. Unlike most previous authors we…
Astrophysical black holes are likely to be surrounded by various forms of matter in the form of disks or halos. While a number of studies have examined the impact of an environment on the lensing of light or gravitational waves from…
Variability in gravitationally lensed quasars can be due to intrinsic fluctuations of the quasar or due to ``microlensing'' by compact objects along the line of sight. If disentangled from each other, microlens-induced variability can be…
Attempts to constrain the Hubble constant using the strong gravitational lens system Q0957+561 are limited by systematic uncertainties in the mass model, since the time delay is known very precisely. One important systematic effect is the…
The observation of the bending of light by mass, now known as gravitational lensing, was key in establishing general relativity as one of the pillars of modern physics. In the past couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in…
We study the influence of general lens and source velocities on the gravitational deflection of light by single and two-point-mass microlenses with general axis orientation. We demonstrate that in all cases the lens equation preserves its…
We study the effect of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ on the bending of light by a concentrated spherically symmetric mass. Contrarily to previous claims, we show that when the Schwarzschild-de Sitter geometry is taken into account,…
Strong gravitational lensing has been a powerful probe of cosmological models and gravity. To date, constraints in either domain have been obtained separately. We propose a new methodology through which the cosmological model, specifically…
Recent developments in gravitational lensing astronomy have paved the way to genuine mappings of the gravitational potential at cosmological scales. We stress that comparing these data with traditional large scale structure surveys will…
The 0th, 1st and 2nd derivatives of a ``Fermat potential'' give the three D's of gravitational lensing: delay, deflection and distortion. Observations of these delays, deflections and distortions for doubly and quadruply imaged quasars give…
Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…
Using a new geometrical method introduced by Werner, we find the deflection angle in the weak limit approximation by a spinning cosmic string in the context of the Einstein-Cartan (EC) theory of gravity. We begin by adopting the…
Gravitational lensing deflects light. A single lens deflector can only shear images, but cannot induce rotations. Multiple lens planes can induce rotations. Such rotations can be observed in quadruply imaged sources, and can be used to…
Time delay in galaxy gravitational lensing systems has been used to determine the value of Hubble constant. As in other dynamical phenomena at the scale of galaxy, dark matter is often invoked in gravitational lensing to account for the…
We consider two problems that have vexed physicists for several decades -- dark matter and the cosmological constant. The problem has been that the former has not been detected while the latter gives a far higher value than detected by…
We reconsider the general properties of gravitational lensing effects induced by cosmic string systems, taking into account their equation of state and motion equations. We explicitly show that the deflection patterns induced by a string is…
We analyzed the influence of static gravitational field on the vacuum and proposed the concept of inhomogeneous vacuum. According to the corresponding Fermat's principle in the general relativity, we derived a graded refractive index of…
Recently, we proposed a generalized Gibbons-Werner (GW) method for analyzing particle trajectories in rotating spacetimes, regardless of their asymptotic behavior [Huang \textit{et al.},…
We found strong similarities between the gravitational lensing and the conventional optical lensing. The similarities imply a graded refractive index description of the light deflection in gravitational field. We got a general approach to…
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up…