Related papers: Strong gravitational lensing's 'external shear' is…
Strong lensing is a powerful tool to address three major astrophysical issues: understanding the spatial distribution of mass at kpc and sub-kpc scale, where baryons and dark matter interact to shape galaxies as we see them; determining the…
In weak gravitational lensing, the image distortion caused by shear measures the projected tidal gravitational field of the deflecting mass distribution. To lowest order, the shear is proportional to the mean image ellipticity. If the image…
Gravitational flexion, caused by derivatives of the gravitational tidal field, is potentially important for the analysis of the dark-matter distribution in gravitational lenses, such as galaxy clusters or the dark-matter haloes of galaxies.…
We have worked out simple analytical formulae that accurately approximate the relationship between the position of the source with respect to the lens center and the amplification of the images, hence the lens cross section, for realistic…
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…
We study the effects of large-scale density fluctuations on strong gravitational lensing. Previous studies have focused mostly on weak lensing, since large-scale structure alone cannot produce multiple images. When a galaxy or cluster acts…
Among the 100 strong lens candidates found in the COSMOS field, 20 with redshifts in the range [0.34,1.13], feature multiple images of background sources. Using the multi-wavelength coverage of the field and its spectroscopic follow-up, we…
We present new results on the gravitational lensing shear and magnification power spectra obtained from numerical simulations of a flat cosmology with a cosmological constant. These results are of considerable interest since both the shear…
As gravitational lensing measurements become increasingly precise, it becomes necessary to include ever higher order effects in the theoretical calculations. Here we show how the difference between the shear and the reduced shear manifest…
Magnification changes the observed number counts of galaxies on the sky. This biases the observed tangential shear profiles around galaxies, the so-called galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL) signal, and the related excess mass profile.…
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…
It is generally thought that galaxies are embedded in dark matter halos extending well beyond their luminous matter. The existence of these galactic halos is mainly derived from the larger than expected velocities of stars and gas in the…
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…
We study the gravitational lensing of high-redshift sources in a LCDM universe. We have performed a series of ray-tracing experiments, and selected a subsample of cases of strong lensing (multiple images, arcs, and Einstein rings). For each…
We study the effects of ellipticity in lens galaxies and external tidal shear from neighboring objects on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses. For isothermal lens galaxies normalized so that the Einstein radius is independent of…
We report a detection of the coherent distortion of faint galaxies arising from gravitational lensing by foreground structures. This ``cosmic shear'' is potentially the most direct measure of the mass power spectrum, as it is unaffected by…
If it is hypothesised that there is no dark matter then some alternative gravitational theory must take the place of general relativity (GR) on the largest scales. Dynamical measurements can be used to investigate the nature of such a…
In modeling strong gravitational lens systems, one often adopts simple models, such as singular isothermal elliptical density plus lowest-order external perturbation. However, such simple models may mislead us if the real mass distribution…
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…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…