Related papers: On simple analytic models of microlensing amplific…
Microlensing of stars in strongly lensed galaxies can lead to temporary extreme magnification factors ($\mu\!>\!1000$), enabling their detection at high redshifts. Following the discovery of Icarus, several stars at cosmological distances…
Gravitational lensing provides a unique and powerful probe of the mass distributions of distant galaxies. Four-image lens systems with fold and cusp configurations have two or three bright images near a critical point. Within the framework…
A comprehensive new approach is presented for deriving probability densities of physical properties characterizing lens or source that constitute an observed galactic microlensing event. While previously encountered problems are overcome,…
The purpose of these lecture notes is to describe the gravitational lens effects in different astrophysical contexts. These notes are voluntarily focused on the fundamental mechanisms and the basic concepts that are useful to describe these…
The current modelling of single microlensing light curves neglects the possibility that only a fraction of the light is due to the lensed star, the remaining being due to a close, unresolved blend, which may be related or unrelated to the…
Traditional evidence for large amount of dark matter is based on dynamical consideration for systems with $ t_{dyn} \gg t_{obs} $. Recent observational and theoretical developments in gravitational lensing offer a much more robust…
The developments summarized with the name ``weak gravitational lensing'' have led to exciting possibilities to study the (statistical properties of the) dark matter distribution in the Universe. Concentrating on those aspects which require…
We describe a new method for measuring galaxy magnification due to weak gravitational lensing. Our method makes use of a tight scaling relation between galaxy properties that are modified by gravitational lensing, such as apparent size, and…
Gravitational lensing is most often used as a tool to investigate the distribution of (dark) matter in the universe, but, if the mass distribution is known a priori, it becomes, at least in principle, a powerful probe of gravity itself.…
Microlensings events are predicted for the light coming from cosmological sources. In addition to the microlensing due to gravitation lensing, microlensing produced also by refraction of light due to either ionized, or not, gas clouds can…
Gravitational lensing has become one of the most powerful tools available for investigating the 'dark side' of the universe. Cosmological strong gravitational lensing, in particular, probes the properties of the dense cores of dark matter…
Strong gravitational lensing has been identified as a promising astrophysical probe to study the particle nature of dark matter. In this paper we present a detailed study of the power spectrum of the projected mass density (convergence)…
The goal of this paper is to provide a numerically fast and stable description for the microlensing amplification of an extended source (either uniform or limb-darkened) that holds in any amplification regime. We show that our method of…
Gravitational weak lensing by large scale structures is view as a tool to probe the bias relation between the mass and the light distributions. It is explained how a particular statistic can be used to deproject the 2D mass distribution…
The passage of stars through the beam of a lensed quasar can induce violent fluctuations in its apparent brightness. The fluctuations observed in the Huchra lens, (2237+0305), are taken to be the first evidence of this ``microlensing''…
The statistics of gravitational lensing can provide us with a very powerful probe of the mass distribution of matter in the universe. By comparing predicted strong lensing probabilities with observations, we can test the mass distribution…
Cluster-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool for exploring the properties of dark matter and constraining cosmological models. However, due to the complex parameter space, pixelized strong lens modeling in galaxy clusters is…
The difficult task of observing Dark Matter subhaloes is of paramount importance since it would constrain Dark Matter particle properties (cold or warm relic) and confirm once again the longstanding $\Lambda$CDM model. In the near future…
We propose a new approach for measuring the mass profile and shape of groups and clusters of galaxies, which uses lensing magnification of distant background galaxies. The main advantage of lensing magnification is that, unlike lensing…
We propose to use eigenvalue densities of unitary random matrix ensembles as mass distributions in gravitational lensing. The corresponding lens equations reduce to algebraic equations in the complex plane which can be treated analytically.…