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When subjected to monochromatic incident light a nanoparticle will emit light which then interferes with the incident beam. With sufficient contrast and sufficiently close to the particle this interference pattern may be recorded with a…
Radio interferometry is the current method of choice for deep space astronomy, but in the past few decades optical techniques have become increasingly common. This research seeks to characterize the performance of aperture masking…
Recently, it has been noticed that the discrepancies in the integrated colour indices (CIs) between star clusters and models are mostly due to the projection of bright stars in the apertures. In order to reduce this problem, the method of…
We present an optical system designed to capture and observe a single neutral atom in an optical dipole trap, created by focussing a laser beam using a large numerical aperture N.A.=0.5 aspheric lens. We experimentally evaluate the…
Adaptive optics will almost completely remove the effects of atmospheric turbulence at 10 microns on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) generation of telescopes. In this paper, we observationally confirm that the next most important…
We have done theoretical calculations and simulations for infrared spectroscopy at the MMT 6.5 m with laser guide star AO, which provides almost full sky coverage. The results show we can expect 40-60% of the photons from a unresolved…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak gravitational lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-convergence…
Low-frequency radio observations of neutral hydrogen during and before the epoch of cosmic reionization will provide hundreds of quasi-independent source planes, each of precisely known redshift, if a resolution of ~ 1 arcminutes or better…
In this article I review recent developments in near-infrared emission line searches for star-forming galaxies at high redshift. Using the J-, H- & K-bands we can potentially chart the history of star formation over the range 1<z<5 using…
We discuss the statistical properties of faint background galaxies detected in a deep Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet (F336W) Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 image of the lensing cluster Abell 370 (z=0.37). By combining modelled field…
Before an exoplanet transit, atmospheric refraction bends light into the line of sight of an observer. The refracted light forms a stellar mirage, a distorted secondary image of the host star. I model this phenomenon and the resultant…
Transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets is a tool to characterize rocky planets and explore their habitability. Using the Earth itself as a proxy, we model the atmospheric cross section as a function of wavelength, and show the effect of…
The fraction of ionizing photons escaping from high-redshift star-forming galaxies remains a key obstacle in evaluating whether galaxies were the primary agents of cosmic reionization. We previously proposed using the covering fraction of…
We present the first weak gravitational lensing analysis of the completed Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). We study the 64 square degrees W1 field, the largest of the CFHTLS-Wide survey fields, and present the largest…
Just as turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere can severely limit the angular resolution of optical telescopes, turbulence in the ionized interstellar medium fundamentally limits the resolution of radio telescopes. We present a scattering…
The Red-Sequence Cluster Survey (RCS) is a 100 square degree galaxy cluster survey designed to provide a large sample of optically selected clusters of galaxies with redshifts 0.1<z<1.4. The survey data are also useful for a variety of…
We present a map of the diffuse ultraviolet cosmic background in two wavelength bands (FUV: 1530 {\AA}; NUV: 2310 {\AA}) over almost 75% of the sky using archival data from the GALEX mission. Most of the diffuse flux is due to…
Our aim is to constrain the properties of dark matter halos inhabiting high density environments, such as is the case in massive galaxy clusters. We use galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques that utilize a maximum likelihood method to constrain…
We investigate the use of simple colour cuts applied to the SDSS optical imaging to perform photometric selections of emission line galaxies out to z<1. From colour-cuts using the SDSS g, r and i bands, we obtain mean photometric redshifts…
The cosmic infrared background from galaxies should have a minimum fluctuation of the order of 10\% on angular scales probed by the DIRBE (Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment) on board COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer). We present the…