Related papers: Measuring cosmic shear and birefringence using res…
We show, using the pseudo-$C_\ell$ technique, how to estimate cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing power spectra that are insensitive to the effects of multiple sources of lensing bias including source-lens clustering, magnification bias…
Since cosmic shear was first observed in 2000, it has become a key cosmological probe and promises to deliver exquisite dark energy constraints. However, shear is inferred from coherent distortions of galaxy shapes, and the relation between…
A long standing problem in weak lensing is about how to construct cosmic shear estimators from galaxy images. Conventional methods average over a single quantity per galaxy to estimate each shear component. We show that any such shear…
Cosmic shear measurements rely on our ability to measure and correct the Point Spread Function (PSF) of the observations. This PSF is measured using stars in the field, which give a noisy measure at random points in the field. Using Wiener…
The current methods available to estimate gravitational shear from astronomical images of galaxies introduce systematic errors which can affect the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological constraints. We study the impact of KSB shape…
Cosmological birefringence is a rotation of the polarization plane of photons coming from sources of astrophysical and cosmological origin. The rotation can also depend on the energy of the photons and not only on the distance of the source…
Cosmic shear tomography has emerged as one of the most promising tools to both investigate the nature of dark energy and discriminate between General Relativity and modified gravity theories. In order to successfully achieve these goals,…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure allows a direct measure of the dark matter distribution. We have used parallel images taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space Telescope to measure weak lensing, or…
As recently shown by Viola et al., the common (KSB) method for measuring weak gravitational shear creates a non-linear relation between the measured and the true shear of objects. We investigate here what effect such a non-linear…
We propose easy ways of correcting for the systematic errors caused by the photon noise and the pixelation effect in cosmic shear measurements. Our treatment of noise can reliably remove the noise contamination to the cosmic shear even when…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure provides a direct measurement of matter fluctuations in the universe. We report a measurement of this `cosmic shear' based on 271 WFPC2 archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey…
Neglecting the second order corrections in weak lensing measurements can lead to a few percent uncertainties on cosmic shears, and becomes more important for cluster lensing mass reconstructions. Existing methods which claim to measure the…
A shearing interferometer is presented which uses polarization control to shear the wavefront and to modulate the interference pattern. The shear is generated by spatial walk-off in a birefringent crystal. By adjusting the orientation of…
Metacalibration is a recently introduced method to accurately measure weak gravitational lensing shear using only the available imaging data, without need for prior information about galaxy properties or calibration from simulations. The…
Polarizations of electromagnetic waves from distant galaxies are known to be correlated with the source orientations. These quantities have been used to search for signals of cosmological birefringence. We review and classify transformation…
We present a new shear estimator for weak lensing observations which properly accounts for the effects of a realistic point spread function (PSF). Images of faint galaxies are subject to gravitational shearing followed by smearing with the…
Forthcoming large-scale surveys will soon attempt to measure cosmic shear to an unprecedented level of accuracy, requiring a similarly high level of accuracy in the shear measurements of galaxies. Factors such as pixelisation, imperfect…
Cosmological birefringence, a rotation by an angle $\alpha$ of the polarization of photons as they propagate over cosmological distances, is constrained by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to be $|\alpha|\lesssim1^\circ$ ($1\sigma$)…
We review the methods used to test for the existence of cosmological birefringence, i.e. a rotation of the plane of linear polarization for electromagnetic radiation traveling over cosmological distances, which might arise in a number of…
A birefringent universe could show itself through a rotation of the plane of polarisation of the cosmic microwave background photons. This is usually investigated using polarisation $B$ modes, which is degenerate with miscalibration of the…