Related papers: The effect of low mass substructures on the Cusp l…
The magnifications of the images in a strong gravitational lens system are sensitive to small mass clumps in the lens potential; this effect has been used to infer the amount of substructure in galaxy dark matter halos. I study the theory…
We analyse the impact of galaxy--halo misalignment on the ability of weak lensing studies to constrain the shape of dark matter haloes, using a combination of the Millennium dark matter N-body simulation and different semi-analytic galaxy…
We cross-correlate APM and SDSS galaxies with background QSOs from the 2dF QSO Redshift Survey, and detect a significant (2.8sigma) anti-correlation. The lack of a signal between 2dF stars and our galaxy samples suggests the…
We present high-resolution mass reconstructions for five massive cluster-lenses spanning a redshift range from z = 0.18 - 0.57 utilizing archival Hubble Space Telescope data and applying galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques. These detailed mass…
While the $\Lambda$CDM model succeeds on large scales, its validity on smaller scales remains uncertain. Recent works suggest that non-halo dark matter structures, such as filaments and walls, could significantly influence gravitational…
The lensing of background QSOs by foreground galaxies is a powerful probe of the mass density of the Universe and the power spectrum of mass clustering. However, the 2dF QSO survey suggested that a strong anticorrelation effect at g<21 was…
N-body simulations and analytical calculations of the gravitational collapse in an expanding universe predict that halos should form with a diverging inner density profile, the cusp. There are some observational indications that the dark…
We examine scatter and bias in weak lensing selected clusters, employing both an analytic model of dark matter haloes and numerical mock data of weak lensing cluster surveys. We pay special attention to effects of the diversity of dark…
Strong gravitational lensing has been identified as a promising astrophysical probe to study the particle nature of dark matter. In this paper we present a detailed study of the power spectrum of the projected mass density (convergence)…
We analyze the seldomly discussed lensing effects expected in low-z clusters (z = 0.05-0.15), using as an example the bright arc (z=0.073) discovered by Campusano and Hardy(1996) near the dominant cD galaxy of the cluster Abell 3408…
We present a detailed investigation into which properties of CDM halos make them effective strong gravitational lenses. Strong lensing cross sections of 878 clusters from an N-body simulation are measured by ray tracing through 13,594…
Gravitational lenses with anomalous flux ratios are often cited as possible evidence for dark matter satellites predicted by simulations of hierarchical merging in cold dark matter cosmogonies. We show that the fraction of quads with…
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…
Halos formed in the standard Lambda cold dark matter framework should follow an universal mass density profile and fit a well defined mass-concentration relation. Lensing analyses of clusters with a large Einstein radius seem to contradict…
Studying the smallest self-bound dark matter structure in our Universe can yield important clues about the fundamental particle nature of dark matter. Galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing provides a unique way to detect and…
We present Halpha rotation curves for a sample of 15 dwarf and LSB galaxies. From these, we derive limits on the slopes of the central mass distributions. Assuming the density distributions of dark matter halos follow a power-law at small…
Recent analyses show that $\Lambda$CDM-based models optimised to reproduce the clustering of massive galaxies overestimate their gravitational lensing by about 30\%, the so-called lensing is low problem. Using a state-of-the-art…
We present an analysis of the galaxy distribution surrounding 15 of the most luminous (>10^{14} L_sun; M_1450 ~ -30) QSOs in the sky with z~2.7. Our data are drawn from the Keck Baryonic Structure Survey (KBSS). In this work, we use the…
Magnification bias is a gravitational lensing effect that is normally overlooked because it is considered sub-optimal in comparison with the lensing shear. Thanks to the demonstrated optimal characteristics of the sub-millimetre galaxies…
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…