Related papers: Mapping dark matter on the celestial sphere with w…
Weak lensing applied to deep optical images of clusters of galaxies provides a powerful tool to reconstruct the distribution of the gravitating mass associated to these structures. We use the shear signal extracted by an analysis of deep…
We present the theoretical and analytical bases of optimal techniques to measure weak gravitational shear from images of galaxies. We first characterize the geometric space of shears and ellipticity, then use this geometric interpretation…
Dark matter cannot be observed directly, but its weak gravitational lensing slightly distorts the apparent shapes of background galaxies, making weak lensing one of the most promising probes of cosmology. Several observational studies have…
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…
Cosmic shear is one of the most powerful probes of Dark Energy, targeted by several current and future galaxy surveys. Lensing shear, however, is only sampled at the positions of galaxies with measured shapes in the catalog, making its…
We propose counting peaks in weak lensing (WL) maps, as a function of their height, to probe models of dark energy and to constrain cosmological parameters. Because peaks can be identified in two-dimensional WL maps directly, they can…
Calibrating the photometric redshifts of >10^9 galaxies for upcoming weak lensing cosmology experiments is a major challenge for the astrophysics community. The path to obtaining the required spectroscopic redshifts for training and…
Cosmic shear surveys serve as a powerful tool for mapping the underlying matter density field, including non-visible dark matter. A key challenge in cosmic shear surveys is the accurate reconstruction of lensing convergence ($\kappa$) maps…
The matter density is an important knowledge for today cosmology as many phenomena are linked to matter fluctuations. However, this density is not directly available, but estimated through lensing maps or galaxy surveys. In this article, we…
We compare cosmic microwave background lensing convergence maps derived from South Pole Telescope (SPT) data with galaxy survey data from the Blanco Cosmology Survey, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, and a new large Spitzer/IRAC…
Motivated by the limitations encountered with the commonly used direct reconstruction techniques of producing mass maps, we have developed a multi-resolution maximum-likelihood reconstruction method for producing two dimensional mass maps…
The existence of galaxy intrinsic clustering severely hampers the weak lensing reconstruction from cosmic magnification. In paper I \citep{Yang2011}, we proposed a minimal variance estimator to overcome this problem. By utilizing the…
Galaxy surveys probe both structure formation and the expansion rate, making them promising avenues for understanding the dark universe. Photometric surveys accurately map the 2D distribution of galaxy positions and shapes in a given…
Lens time delays are a powerful probe of cosmology, provided that the gravitational potential of the main deflector can be modeled with sufficient precision. Recent work has shown that this can be achieved by detailed modeling of the host…
Weak gravitational lensing has been used extensively in the past decade to constrain the masses of galaxy clusters, and is the most promising observational technique for providing the mass calibration necessary for precision cosmology with…
This paper details a description of the pattern of galaxy image distortion over the entire sky caused by the gravitational lensing which is the result of large scale inhomogeneities in our universe. We present a tensor spherical harmonic…
Optical imaging surveys measure both the galaxy density and the gravitational lensing-induced shear fields across the sky. Recently, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration used a joint fit to two-point correlations between these…
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…
Weak gravitational lensing has become a common tool to constrain the cosmological model. The majority of the methods to derive constraints on cosmological parameters use second-order statistics of the cosmic shear. Despite their success,…
Galaxies are biased tracers of the matter density on cosmological scales. For future tests of galaxy models, we refine and assess a method to measure galaxy biasing as function of physical scale $k$ with weak gravitational lensing. This…