Related papers: Reduced Shear Power Spectrum
We demonstrate that the aperture mass as a measure for cosmic shear closely approximates (to better than ~5%) the scaled and shifted power spectrum of the projected mass density. This cosmological weak-lensing information can thus be used…
Cosmic shear probes the distribution of dark matter via gravitational lensing of distant, background galaxies. We describe our cosmic shear survey consisting of deep blank fields observed with the Keck II telescope. We have found biases in…
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…
Cosmic shear is a powerful method to constrain cosmology, provided that any systematic effects are under control. The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is expected to severely bias parameter estimates if not taken into account. We explore the…
We report a detection of the coherent distortion of faint galaxies arising from gravitational lensing by foreground structures. This ``cosmic shear'' is potentially the most direct measure of the mass power spectrum, as it is unaffected by…
Stripe 82 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was observed multiple times, allowing deeper images to be constructed by coadding the data. Here we analyze the ellipticities of background galaxies in this 275 square degree region, searching for…
As pointed out in previous studies, the measurement of the skewness of the convergence field $\kappa$ will be useful in breaking the degeneracy among the cosmological parameters constrained from weak lensing observations. The combination of…
Upcoming photometric lensing surveys will considerably tighten constraints on the neutrino mass and the dark energy equation of state. Nevertheless it remains an open question of how to optimally extract the information and how well the…
We study the effects of ellipticity in lens galaxies and external tidal shear from neighboring objects on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses. For isothermal lens galaxies normalized so that the Einstein radius is independent of…
Galaxy color gradients - i.e., spectral energy distributions that vary across the galaxy profile - will impact galaxy shape measurements when the modeled point spread function (PSF) corresponds to that for a galaxy with spatially uniform…
Upcoming weak lensing surveys will survey large cosmological volumes to measure the growth of cosmological structure with time and thereby constrain dark energy. One major systematic uncertainty in this process is the calibration of the…
The current methods available to estimate gravitational shear from astronomical images of galaxies introduce systematic errors which can affect the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological constraints. We study the impact of KSB shape…
We present the first "clipped" cosmic shear measurement using data from the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-450). "Clipping" transformations suppress the signal from the highest density, non-linear regions of cosmological fields. We demonstrate…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys are rapidly becoming important tools to probe directly the mass density fluctuations in the universe and its background dynamics. Earlier studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of…
We analyse the functional derivative of the cosmic-shear power spectrum $C_\ell^\gamma$ with respect to the cosmic expansion function. Our interest in doing so is two-fold: (i) In view of attempts to detect minor changes of the cosmic…
We report on the marginal detection of cosmic shear on sub-arcmin scales with archive data from the STIS camera on board HST. For the measurement 121 galaxy fields with a field of view of 51'' x 51'' are used to obtain an rms cosmic shear…
We show that simple models of scalar-field dark energy leave a generic enhancement in the weak-lensing power spectrum when compared to the LCDM prediction. In particular, we calculate the linear-scale enhancement in the convergence (or…
Gravitational lensing by large-scale structure induces weak coherent alignments in the shapes of background galaxies. Here we present evidence for the detection of this `cosmic shear' at the 3.4 sigma significance level with the William…
We explore the stability of the variance and skewness of the cosmic gravitational convergence field, using two different approaches: first we simulate a whole MEGACAM survey (100 sq. degrees). The reconstructed mass map, obtained from a…
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…