Related papers: The Shear TEsting Programme 1: Weak lensing analys…
We investigate the expected correlation between the weak gravitational shear of distant galaxies and the orientation of foreground galaxies, through the use of numerical simulations. This shear-ellipticity correlation can mimic a…
We develop and apply the position angle-only shear estimator of Whittaker et al. (2014) to realistic galaxy images. This is done by demonstrating the method on the simulations of the GREAT3 challenge (Mandelbaum et al. 2014b), which include…
In weak gravitational lensing, the image distortion caused by shear measures the projected tidal gravitational field of the deflecting mass distribution. To lowest order, the shear is proportional to the mean image ellipticity. If the image…
When extracting the weak lensing shear signal, one may employ either locally normalized or globally normalized shear estimators. The former is the standard approach when estimating cluster masses, while the latter is the more common method…
We perform a cosmic shear analysis of the COMBO-17 survey -- a unique dataset with shear quality R-band imaging and accurate photometric redshift estimates (dz=0.05) for ~90% of galaxies to R=24.0. We undertake a full maximum likelihood…
We develop a new method of extracting simultaneous measurements of weak lensing shear and a local rotation of the plane of polarization using observations of resolved radio sources. We show that the direction of polarization is…
Photo-z errors, especially catastrophic errors, are a major uncertainty for precision weak lensing cosmology. We find that the shear-(galaxy number) density and density-density cross correlation measurements between photo-z bins, available…
Galaxy-galaxy lensing has emerged as a powerful probe of the dark matter halos of galaxies, but is subject to contamination if intrinsically aligned satellites of the lens galaxy are used as part of the source sample. We present a…
In this paper we introduce the SEAGLE (i.e. Simulating EAGLE LEnses) program, that approaches the study of galaxy formation through strong gravitational lensing, using a suite of high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations, Evolution and…
The present generation of weak lensing surveys will be superseded by surveys run from space with much better sky coverage and high level of signal to noise ratio, such as SNAP. However, removal of any systematics or noise will remain a…
We present a tomographic cosmological weak lensing analysis of the HST COSMOS Survey. Applying our lensing-optimized data reduction, principal component interpolation for the ACS PSF, and improved modelling of charge-transfer inefficiency,…
Weak gravitational lensing requires precise measurements of galaxy shapes and therefore an accurate knowledge of the PSF model. The latter can be a source of systematics that affect the shear two-point correlation function. A key stake of…
We calculate the systematic errors in the weak gravitational lensing power spectrum which would be caused by spatially varying calibration (i.e. multiplicative) errors, such as might arise from uncorrected seeing or extinction variations.…
Images taken by space telescopes typically have a superb spatial resolution, but a relatively poor sampling rate due to the finite CCD pixel size. Beyond the Nyquist limit, it becomes uncertain how much the pixelation effect may affect the…
Challenges inherent to high-resolution and high signal-to-noise data as well as model degeneracies can cause systematic biases in analyses of strong lens systems. In the past decade, the number of lens modeling methods has significantly…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly map the dark matter in the universe and measure cosmological parameters. Current weak lensing surveys are limited by the atmospheric seeing from the ground and by the small…
We develop a new method to estimate gravitational shear by adopting an elliptical weight function to measure background galaxy images. In doing so, we introduce a new concept of "zero plane" which is an imaginal source plane where shapes of…
We describe the first spectroscopic tomographic (spectrotomographic) weak lensing measurement for a galaxy cluster based only on background galaxies with spectroscopically determined redshifts. We use the massive cluster A2029 to…
Precision weak gravitational lensing experiments require measurements of galaxy shapes accurate to <1 part in 1000. We investigate measurement biases, noted by Voigt and Bridle (2009) and Melchior et al. (2009), that are common to shape…
Chromatic point-spread-function (PSF) effects arise from differences between the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of stars, used to model the PSF, and galaxies, used to measure shape distortions due to weak gravitational lensing, or…