Related papers: Mapping the 3-D Dark Matter potential with weak sh…
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…
Kinematic weak lensing describes the distortion of a galaxy's projected velocity field due to lensing shear, an effect recently reported for the first time by Gurri et al. based on a sample of 18 galaxies at $z \sim 0.1$. In this paper, we…
Measurement of the gravitational distortion of images of distant galaxies is rapidly becoming established as a powerful probe of the dark mass distribution in clusters of galaxies. With the advent of large mosaics of CCD's these methods…
We infer gravitational lensing shear and convergence fields from galaxy ellipticity catalogs under a spatial process prior for the lensing potential. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm with simulated Gaussian-distributed…
We explore the discovery potential of light gravitino mass m_{3/2} by combining future cosmology surveys and collider experiments. The former probe the imprint of light gravitinos in the cosmic matter density field, whereas the latter…
Gravitational lensing can provide pure geometric tests of the structure of space-time, for instance by determining empirically the angular diameter distance-redshift relation. This geometric test has been demonstrated several times using…
Galaxies are biased tracers of the matter density on cosmological scales. For future tests of galaxy models, we refine and assess a method to measure galaxy biasing as function of physical scale $k$ with weak gravitational lensing. This…
We develop an algorithm for the reconstruction of the two-dimensional mass distribution of a gravitational lens from the observable distortion of background galaxies. From the measured reduced shear, the lens mapping is obtained, from which…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. Nowadays, attention has shifted from clusters of galaxies to the statistical properties…
Wide area Large-Scale Structure (LSS) surveys are planning to map a substantial fraction of the visible universe to quantify dark energy through Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). At increasing redshift, for example that probed by proposed…
We present a three dimensional cosmic shear analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey, the largest ever optical imaging program performed in space. We have measured the shapes of galaxies for the tell-tale distortions caused by…
Number counts of galaxy clusters across redshift are a powerful cosmological probe, if a precise and accurate reconstruction of the underlying mass distribution is performed -- a challenge called mass calibration. With the advent of wide…
We introduce a novel approach to reconstruct dark matter mass maps from weak gravitational lensing measurements. The cornerstone of the proposed method lies in a new modelling of the matter density field in the Universe as a mixture of two…
We develop and test a method for measuring the gravitational lensing induced distortion of faint background galaxies. We first describe how we locate the galaxies and measure a 2-component `polarisation' or ellipticity statistic $e_\alpha$…
We study the ability of weak lensing surveys to detect galaxy clusters and constrain cosmological parameters, in particular the equation of state of dark energy. There are two major sources of noise for weak lensing cluster measurements:…
Weak lensing applied to deep optical images of clusters of galaxies provides a powerful tool to reconstruct the distribution of the gravitating mass associated to these structures. We use the shear signal extracted by an analysis of deep…
(Abridged) Weak gravitational lensing induces distortions on the images of background galaxies, and thus provides a direct measure of mass fluctuations in the universe. Since the distortions induced by lensing on the images of background…
Recently, it has been shown that it is possible to reconstruct the projected mass distribution of a cluster from weak lensing provided that both the geometry of the universe and the probability distribution of galaxy redshifts are known;…
Given a foreground galaxy-density field or shear field, its cross-correlation with the shear field from a background population of source galaxies scales with the source redshift in a way that is specific to lensing. Such a source-scaling…
The tidal gravitational field of galaxy clusters causes a coherent distortion of the images of background sources. Since the distribution of image distortions, namely the shear field, traces the local gravitational potential of a deflector,…