Related papers: Determining the Microlens Mass Function from Quasa…
By comparing the results of numerical microlensing simulations to the observed long-term variability of quasars, strong upper limits on the cosmological density of compact objects in the mass range 0.01 to 0.0001 solar masses may be…
Intensive monitoring campaigns have recently attempted to measure the time delays between multiple images of gravitational lenses. Some of the resulting light-curves show puzzling low-level, rapid variability which is unique to individual…
We examine the wavelength dependence of flux ratios for six gravitationally lensed quasars using K and L' images obtained at the Gemini North 8m telescope. We select lenses with source redshifts z_s < 2.8 so that K-band images probe…
The quadruple lensed system WGD2038-4008 was recently discovered with the help of new techniques and observations. Even though black hole mass has been estimated for lensed quasars, it has been calculated mostly for one broad emission line…
We follow the microlensing approach and quantify the occurrence of Kepler exoplanets as a function of planet-to-star mass ratio, q, rather than planet radius or mass. For planets with radii ~1-6 R_earth and periods <100 days, we find that,…
We present a measurement of the free-streaming length of dark matter (DM) and subhalo abundance around 28 quadruple image strong lenses using observations from JWST MIRI presented in Paper III of this series. We improve on previous…
The microlensing effect has developed into a powerful technique for a diverse range of applications including exoplanet discoveries, structure of the Milky Way, constraints on MAssive Compact Halo Objects, and measurements of the size and…
To maximize the number of planet detections, current microlensing follow-up observations are focusing on high-magnification events which have a higher chance of being perturbed by central caustics. In this paper, we investigate the…
We compute statistical properties of weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structure in three Cold Dark Matter models. We use a P$^3$M $N$-body code to simulate the formation and evolution of large-scale structure in the universe. We…
We estimate the bias on weak lensing mass measurements of shear-selected galaxy cluster samples. The mass bias is expected to be significant because constructions of cluster samples from peaks in weak lensing mass maps and measurements of…
Flux ratio anomalies in strong gravitationally lensed quasars constitute a unique way to probe the abundance of non-luminous dark matter haloes, and hence the nature of dark matter. In this paper we identify double imaged quasars as a…
Flux ratio `anomalies' in quadruply-imaged gravitational lenses can be explained with galactic substructure of the sort predicted by CDM, but the strength and uniqueness of that hypothesis needs to be further assessed. A good way to do that…
We present the first measurement of the mass function of galaxy clusters based directly on cluster masses derived from observations of weak gravitational lensing. To investigate the degree of sample incompleteness resulting from the X-ray…
Quasar luminosity functions are a fundamental probe of the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes. Measuring the intrinsic luminosity function is difficult in practice, due to a multitude of observational and systematic effects.…
We investigate the discrepancy between the predicted size of accretion disks (ADs) in quasars and the observed sizes as deduced from gravitational microlensing studies. Specifically, we aim to understand whether the discrepancy is due to an…
We discuss whether one should expect that multiply imaged QSOs can be understood with `simple' lens models which contain a handful of parameters. Whereas for many lens systems such simple mass models yield a remarkably good description of…
Connection between the quasar luminosity function and galaxy mass function is investigated in the framework of a phenomenological approach which relates AGN formation to galaxy mergers. Quasars are assumed to be short-lived, the luminosity…
We present the results of microlens ray-tracing simulations showing the effect of absorbing material between a source quasar and a lensing galaxy in a gravitational lens system. We find that, in addition to brightness fluctuations due to…
Strong gravitational lensing leads to an occurrence of multiple images, with different magnifications, of a lensed source. Those magnifications can in turn be modified by microlensing on smaller mass scales within the lens. Recently,…
We aim to use signatures of microlensing induced by stars in the foreground lens galaxy to infer the size of the accretion disk in the gravitationally lensed quasar Q 0957+561. The long-term photometric monitoring of this system (which so…