Related papers: Measuring Flexion
We present a novel approach to measuring the expansion rate and the geometry of the Universe, which combine time-delay cosmography in lens galaxy clusters with pure samples of 'cosmic chronometers' (CCs) by probing the member galaxies. The…
We examine the prospects for measurement of the Hubble parameter $H_0$ via observation of the secular parallax of other galaxies due to our own motion relative to the cosmic microwave background rest frame. Peculiar velocities make distance…
Shape measurements of galaxies and galaxy clusters are widespread in the analysis of cosmological simulations. But the limitations of those measurements have been poorly investigated. In this paper, we explain why the quality of the shape…
We present a new technique for monitoring microlensing activity even in highly crowded fields, and use this technique to place limits on low-mass MACHOs in the haloes of M31 and the Galaxy. Unlike present Galactic microlensing surveys, we…
We revisit the performance and biases of the two-dimensional approach to galaxy-galaxy lensing. This method exploits the information for the actual positions and ellipticities of source galaxies, rather than using only the ensemble…
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…
The measurement of weak gravitational lensing is currently limited to a precision of ~10% by instabilities in galaxy shape measurement techniques and uncertainties in their calibration. The potential of large, on-going and future cosmic…
We report a significant detection of weak, tangential distortion of the images of cosmologically distant, faint galaxies due to gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies. A mean image polarisation of $<p>=0.011\pm 0.006$ is measured for…
For cosmic shear to become an accurate cosmological probe, systematic errors in the shear measurement method must be unambiguously identified and corrected for. Previous work of this series has demonstrated that cosmic shears can be…
Large area lensing surveys are expected to make it possible to use cosmic shear tomography as a tool to severely constrain cosmological parameters. To this end, one typically relies on second order statistics such as the two - point…
Gravitational lensing directly measures mass density fluctuations along the lines of sight to very distant objects. No assumptions need to be made concerning bias, the ratio of fluctuations in galaxy density to mass density. Hence, lensing…
Strong lensing has developed into an important astrophysical tool for probing both cosmology and galaxies (their structure, formation, and evolution). Using the gravitational lensing theory and cluster mass distribution model, we try to…
Accurate mock catalogues are essential for assessing systematics in the cosmological analysis of large galaxy surveys. Anisotropic two-point clustering measurements from the same simulation show some scatter for different lines of sight…
We show that it is possible to estimate the shape of an object by measuring only the fluctuations of a probing field, allowing us to expose the object to a minimal light intensity. This scheme, based on noise measurements through homodyne…
We present three-epoch multiband ($V_{606}$, $i_{775}$, $z_{850}$) measurements of galaxy shapes using the ``polar shapelet'' or Laguerre-expansions method with the Hubble Space Telescope ($HST$) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) data,…
Recent cosmic shear studies have shown that higher-order statistics (HOS) developed by independent teams now outperform standard two-point estimators in terms of statistical precision thanks to their sensitivity to the non-Gaussian features…
We present a new approach to measure the mass function of dark matter halos and to discriminate models with differing values of Omega through weak gravitational lensing. We measure the distribution of peaks from simulated lensing surveys…
We introduce a collection of statistics appropriate for the study of spinorial quantities defined in three dimensions, focussing on applications to cosmological weak gravitational lensing studies in 3D. In particular, we concentrate on…
We explore three different methods based on weak lensing to extract cosmological constraints from the large-scale structure. In the first approach (method I), small-scale galaxy lensing measurements of their halo mass provide a constraint…
Pixel lensing, gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars, is potentially much more sensitive and much more widely applicable than is generally recognized. I give explicit expressions for the pixel noise induced by a time-variable PSF,…