Related papers: Cosmic Shear with Einstein Rings
Intrinsic alignments constitute the major astrophysical systematic for cosmological weak lensing surveys. We present a purely geometrical method with which one can study gravitational shear-intrinsic ellipticity correlations directly in…
Upcoming weak lensing surveys will survey large cosmological volumes to measure the growth of cosmological structure with time and thereby constrain dark energy. One major systematic uncertainty in this process is the calibration of the…
Weak lensing surveys exploit measurements of galaxy ellipticities. These measurements are subject to errors which degrade the cosmological information that can be extracted from the surveys. Here we propose a way of using the galaxy data…
The tight correlations found between masses of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the luminosities, total stellar masses, and velocity dispersions of their host galaxies are often interpreted as a sign of their co-evolution. Studying…
We present a cosmic shear analysis of the 100 square degree weak lensing survey, combining data from the CFHTLS-Wide, RCS, VIRMOS-DESCART and GaBoDS surveys. Spanning ~100 square degrees, with a median source redshift z~0.78, this combined…
Optical weak lensing surveys have become a powerful tool for precision cosmology, but remain subject to systematic effects that can severely bias cosmological parameter estimates if not carefully removed. We discuss the possibility of…
Weak lensing provides a direct measure of the distribution of mass in the universe, and is therefore a uniquely powerful probe of dark matter. Weak lensing can also be used to measure the twin phenomenon of dark energy, via its effect upon…
We present the results of weak gravitational lensing statistics in four different cosmological $N$-body simulations. The data has been generated using an algorithm for the three-dimensional shear, which makes use of a variable softening…
Weak gravitational lensing causes subtle changes in the apparent shapes of galaxies due to the bending of light by the gravity of foreground masses. By measuring the shapes of large numbers of galaxies (millions in recent surveys, up to…
We study the possibility for a measurement of neutrino mass using weak gravitational lensing. The presence of non-zero mass neutrinos leads to a suppression of power at small scales and reduces the expected weak lensing signal. The…
In this paper we investigate the strong lensing statistics in galaxy clusters. We extract dark matter haloes from the Millennium-XXL simulation, compute their Einstein radius distribution, and find a very good agreement with Monte Carlo…
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…
In current microlensing experiments, the information about the physical parameters of individual lenses are obtained from the Einstein timescales. However, the nature of MACHOs is still very uncertain despite the large number of detected…
I review the current status of combing weak gravitational lensing with depth information from redshifts as a direct probe of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe. In particular I highlight: (1) The first maximum likelihood…
We present new mass models for the gravitational lens system B1938+666, using multi-wavelength data acquired from Keck adaptive optics (AO) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations. These models are the first results from the…
We present a new approach to measuring cosmic shear: the one-component kinematic lensing (KL) method. This technique provides a simplified implementation of KL that reduces shape noise in weak lensing (WL) by combining kinematic information…
Recent galaxy redshift surveys have brought in a large amount of accurate cosmological data out to redshift 0.3, and future surveys are expected to achieve a high degree of completeness out to a redshift exceeding 1. Consequently, a…
A long-standing problem of strong lensing by galaxy clusters regards the observed high rate of giant gravitational arcs as compared to the predictions in the framework of the "standard" cosmological model. Recently, few other…
We identify and study a previously unknown systematic effect on cosmic shear measurements, caused by the selection of galaxies used for shape measurement, in particular the rejection of close (blended) galaxy pairs. We use ray-tracing…
With future wide and deep cosmological sky surveys, a large number of gravitationally lensed, multiply imaged systems will be found. In addition to multiply imaged galaxies and quasars, sources will include transient events like supernovae…