Related papers: Effects of Subhalos on Interpreting Highly Magnifi…
Luminous stars in background galaxies straddling the lensing caustic of a foreground galaxy cluster can be individually detected due to extreme magnification factors of $\sim 10^2$--$10^3$, as recently observed in deep HST images. We…
Dark matter subhalos with extended profiles and density cores, and globular stars clusters of mass $10^6-10^8 M_\odot$, that live near the critical curves in galaxy cluster lenses can potentially be detected through their lensing…
We investigate the effects of numerous dark matter subhalos in a galaxy-sized halo on the events of strong lensing, to assess their presence as expected from the cold dark matter scenario. Lens galaxies are represented by a smooth ellipsoid…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
Cosmological cluster-scale strong gravitational lensing probes the mass distribution of the dense cores of massive dark matter halos and the structures along the line of sight from background sources to the observer. It is frequently…
We study the gravitational lensing properties of a massive object in a dark matter halo, concentrating on the critical curves and caustics of the combined lens. We model the system in the simplest approximation by a point mass embedded in a…
Galactic sized gravitational lenses are simulated by combining a cosmological N-body simulation and models for the baryonic component of the galaxy. The lens caustics, critical curves, image locations and magnification ratios are calculated…
The dark halo substructures predicted by current cold dark matter simulations may in principle be detectable through strong-lensing image splitting of quasars on small angular scales (0.01 arcseconds or below). Here, we estimate the overall…
A galaxy cluster acts as a cosmic telescope over background galaxies but also as a cosmic microscope of the lens imperfections. The diverging magnification of lensing caustics enhances the microlensing effect of substructure present within…
Measuring the distribution of mass on galaxy cluster scales is a crucial test of the Lambda CDM model, providing constraints on the nature of dark matter. Recent work investigating mass distributions of individual galaxy clusters using…
Microlensing near macro-caustics is a complex phenomenon in which swarms of micro-images produced by micro-caustics form on both sides of a macro-critical curve. Recent discoveries of highly magnified images of individual stars in massive…
We measure the gravitational lensing signal around satellite galaxies in a sample of galaxy clusters at $z<0.15$ by combining high-quality imaging data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with a large sample of…
Extreme magnifications of distant objects by factors of several thousand have recently become a reality. Small very luminous compact objects, such as supernovae (SNe), giant stars at z=1-2, Pop III stars at z>7 and even gravitational waves…
Gravitational lensing has emerged as a powerful probe of the matter distribution on subgalactic scales, which itself may contain important clues about the fundamental origins and properties of dark matter. Broadly speaking, two different…
We study lensing magnification of source galaxies by intervening galaxy groups and clusters using a halo model. Halos are modeled with truncated NFW profiles with ellipticity added to their lensing potential and propagated to observable…
Bright sub-mm galaxies are expected to arise in massive highly-biased haloes, and hence exhibit strong clustering. We argue that a valuable tool for measuring these clustering properties is the cross-correlation of sub-mm galaxies with…
We examine a caustic-straddling arc at $z=0.9397$ in the field of the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1-2403 ($z=0.397$) using archival multiband HST images and show that its surface brightness exhibits anomalies that can be explained by a single…
Magnification bias, an observational effect of gravitational lensing in the weak regime, allows testing the cosmological model through angular correlations of sources at different redshifts. This effect has been observed in various…
Cluster gravitational lensing surveys like the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields survey will detect distant galaxies 10-50 times fainter than any yet discovered. Using these surveys to measure the luminosity function of such faint,…
We review observations and gravitational lensing theory related to the magnification of background QSOs by intervening overdensities, and the induced cross-correlation between sources and foreground galaxies. We pay special attention to…