Related papers: Cosmic convergence and shear with extended sources
Galaxy shapes are not randomly oriented, rather they are statistically aligned in a way that can depend on formation environment, history and galaxy type. Studying the alignment of galaxies can therefore deliver important information about…
We estimate the effects of weak lensing by large-scale density inhomogeneities and long-wavelength gravitational waves upon the polarization properties of electromagnetic radiation as it propagates from cosmologically distant sources.…
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…
We derive a new relation between cosological distances, valid in any (statistically) isotropic space-time and independent of cosmological parameters or even the validity of the field equation of General Relativity. In particular, this…
Any theory invoked to explain cosmic acceleration predicts consistency relations between the expansion history, structure growth, and all related observables. Currently there exist high-quality measurements of the expansion history from…
We present a full-sky derivation of weak lensing observables in the Post-Friedmann (PF) formalism. Weak lensing has the characteristic of mixing small scales and large scales since it is affected by inhomogeneities integrated along the…
Weak-lensing searches for galaxy clusters are plagued by low completeness and purity, severely limiting their usefulness for constraining cosmological parameters with the cluster mass function. A significant fraction of `false positives'…
A small volume of space, nearly on-axis behind a gravitational lens with respect to a given source, will receive a greatly increased radiation flux. In the idealized case of a point mass lens acting on a point source in complete isolation,…
We consider evidence for deviations from General Relativity (GR) in the growth of large scale structure, using two parameters, $\gamma$ and $\eta$, to quantify the modification. We consider the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (ISW) in the…
We analyse the functional derivative of the cosmic-shear power spectrum $C_\ell^\gamma$ with respect to the cosmic expansion function. Our interest in doing so is two-fold: (i) In view of attempts to detect minor changes of the cosmic…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) represents a unique source for the study of gravitational lensing. It is extended across the entire sky, partially polarized, located at the extreme distance of z=1100, and is thought to have the…
Future experiments will produce high-resolution temperature maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and are expected to reveal the signature of gravitational lensing by intervening large-scale structures. We construct all-sky…
We compute the reduced cosmic shear up to second order in the gravitational potential without relying on the small angle or thin-lens approximation. This is obtained by solving the Sachs equation which describes the deformation of the…
We use weak lensing data from the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey to measure the second- and third-moments of the cosmic shear field, estimated from about 450,000 galaxies with average redshift <z> ~ 1.3. We measure two- and…
Weak gravitational lensing by the intervening large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe is the leading non-linear effect on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The integrated line-of-sight mass that causes the…
Weak gravitational lensing is normally assumed to have only two principle effects: a magnification of a source and a distortion of the sources shape in the form of a shear. However, further distortions are actually present owing to changes…
We review the effect of the commonly-used Limber and flat-sky approximations on the calculation of shear power spectra and correlation functions for galaxy weak lensing. These approximations are accurate at small scales, but it has been…
Weak lensing convergence can be used directly to map and probe the dark mass distribution in the universe. Building on earlier studies, we recall how the statistics of the convergence field are related to the statistics of the underlying…
Gravitational lensing affects observed cosmological correlation functions because observed images do not coincide with true source locations. We treat this universal effect in a general way here, deriving a single formula that can be used…
We explore the dependence of weak lensing phenomena on the background cosmology. We first generalise the relation between $P_\psi(\omega)$, the angular power spectrum of the distortion, and the power spectrum of density fluctuations to…