Related papers: Lensing Optical Depth for Substructure and Isolate…
A fundamental prediction of the cold dark matter cosmology is the existence of a large number of dark subhalos around galaxies, most of which should be entirely devoid of stars. Confirming the existence of dark substructures stands among…
We explore the use of strong lensing by galaxy clusters to constrain the dark energy equation of state and its possible time variation. The cores of massive clusters often contain several multiply imaged systems of background galaxies at…
In the standard structure formation scenario based on the cold dark matter paradigm, galactic halos are predicted to contain a large population of dark matter subhalos. While the most massive members of the subhalo population can appear as…
A new method for measuring gravitational lensing with high redshift type Ia supernovae is investigated. The method utilizes correlations between foreground galaxies and supernova brightnesses to substantially reduce possible systematic…
Optical and X-ray observations of strongly gravitationally lensed quasars (especially when four separate images of the quasar are produced) determine not only the amount of matter in the lensing galaxy but also how much is in a smooth…
Since the strength of weak gravitational lensing is proportional to the mass along the line of sight, it might be possible to use lensing data to find the masses of individual dark matter clusters. Unfortunately, the effect on the lensing…
In recent years, it has become possible to detect individual dark matter subhalos near images of strongly lensed extended background galaxies. Typically, only the most massive subhalos in the strong lensing region may be detected this way.…
Weak shear maps of the outer regions of clusters have been successfully used to map the distribution of mass at large radii from the cluster center. The typical smoothing lengths employed thus far preclude the systematic study of the…
We study the time variation of the apparent flux of cosmological point sources due to the transient weak lensing by dark matter microhaloes. Assuming a transverse motion of microhaloes with respect to our line of sight, we derive the…
We demonstrate that the flux ratios of 4-image lensed quasars provide a powerful means of probing the small scale structure of Dark Matter (DM) halos. A family of smooth lens models can precisely predict certain combinations of flux ratios…
Strong gravitational lensing is a promising way of uncovering the nature of dark matter, by finding perturbations to images that cannot be well accounted for by modeling the lens galaxy without additional structure, be it subhalos (smaller…
Galaxy clusters identified with optical imaging tend to suffer from projection effects, which impact richness (the number of member galaxies in a cluster) and lensing coherently. Physically unassociated galaxies can be mistaken as cluster…
In the cold dark matter scenario, dark matter halos are assembled hierarchically from smaller subunits. Some of these subunits are disrupted during the merging process, whereas others survive temporarily in the form of subhalos. A…
We study the efficiency of numerically simulated galaxy clusters for producing strong gravitational lensing events in different dark-energy cosmologies with constant and time-variable equation of state and we compare it with ``standard''…
Current theories of structure formation predict specific density profiles of galaxy dark matter haloes, and with weak gravitational lensing we can probe these profiles on several scales. On small scales, higher-order shape distortions known…
In collisions of galaxy clusters, the lack of displacement between dark matter and galaxies suggests that the dark matter scattering depth is small. This yields an upper limit on the dark matter cross section if the dark matter column…
An anomaly in the distribution of quasar magnitudes based on the SDSS survey, has been recently reported by Longo (2012). The angular size of this anomaly is of the order of $\rm \pm 15^o$ on the sky. A low surface brightness smooth…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
We demonstrate that the perturbations of strongly lensed images by low-mass dark matter subhalos are significantly impacted by the concentration of the perturbing subhalo. For subhalo concentrations expected in $\Lambda$CDM, significant…
We simultaneously constrain cosmology and galaxy bias using measurements of galaxy abundances, galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We use the conditional luminosity function (which describes…