Related papers: Cosmic shear surveys
It is now routine to measure the weak gravitational lensing shear signal from the mean ellipticity of distant galaxies. However, conversion between ellipticity and shear assumes local linearity of the lensing potential (ie that the spatial…
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…
Optical weak lensing surveys have become a powerful tool for precision cosmology, but remain subject to systematic effects that can severely bias cosmological parameter estimates if not carefully removed. We discuss the possibility of…
Vector perturbations sourced by topological defects can generate rotations in the lensing of background galaxies. This is a potential smoking gun for the existence of defects since rotation generates a curl-like component in the weak…
We study the correlation between the locations of galaxy-galaxy strong lensing candidates and tracers of large-scale structure from both weak lensing or X-ray emission. The COSMOS survey is a unique data set, combining deep, high resolution…
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…
The magnification of galaxies in modern galaxy surveys induces additional correlations in the cosmic shear, galaxy-galaxy lensing and clustering observables used in modern lensing "3x2pt" analyses, due to sample selection. In this paper, we…
I compare various semi-analytic models for the bias of dark matter halos with halo clustering properties observed in recent numerical simulations. The best fitting model is one based on the collapse of ellipsoidal perturbations proposed by…
Weak gravitational lensing is one of the most promising cosmological probes of the late universe. Several large ongoing (DES, KiDS, HSC) and planned (LSST, EUCLID, WFIRST) astronomical surveys attempt to collect even deeper and larger scale…
Cosmic shear is a powerful probe of cosmological distances, matter abundance and clustering in the low-redshift Universe. Cosmological parameter extraction from cosmic shear data is limited by our understanding of baryonic astrophysics,…
We argue that massive quantum fields source low-frequency long-wavelength metric fluctuations through the quantum fluctuations of their stress-energy, given reasonable assumptions about the analytic structure of its correlators. This can be…
We explore the use of the tangential component of weak lensing shear to characterize the ellipticity of clusters of galaxies. We introduce an ellipticity estimator, and quantify its properties for isolated clusters from LCDM N-body…
Recent N-body simulations have shown that the assembly history of galactic halos depend on the density of large-scale environment. It implies that the galaxy properties like age and size of bulge may also vary with the surrounding…
Cosmic flexion, like cosmic shear, is a correlation function whose signal originates from the large-scale structure of the universe. Building on the observational success of cosmic shear, along with the unprecedented quality of large-scale…
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are the most dark matter dominated systems in the nearby Universe and their origin is one of the outstanding puzzles of how galaxies form. Dwarf spheroidals are poor in gas and stars, making them unusually faint,…
Point estimators for the shearing of galaxy images induced by gravitational lensing involve a complex inverse problem in the presence of noise, pixelization, and model uncertainties. We present a probabilistic forward modeling approach to…
We present results of our cosmic shear survey in progress at the Canada- France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). We analysed 1.7 sq. degrees of data, out of which we measured a significant correlation of galaxy shape-orientation over several arcmin…
We report a detection of the effect of the large-scale velocity shear on the spatial distributions of the galactic satellites around the isolated hosts. Identifying the isolated galactic systems each of which consists of a single host…
The notion of vacuum fluctuations of the gravitational field plays important role in cosmology. The strong variable gravitational field of the very early Universe amplifies these fluctuations and transforms them into macroscopical…
We calculate the scalar power spectrum generated by sourced fluctuations due to coupling between the scalar field, which holds most of the energy density of the universe, and a gauge field for a general FLRW metric. For this purpose we…