Related papers: Weak gravitational shear and flexion with polar sh…
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…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly measure the distribution of mass in the universe. Because the distortions induced by lensing in the shape of background galaxies are small, the measurement of weak lensing…
We present the theoretical and analytical bases of optimal techniques to measure weak gravitational shear from images of galaxies. We first characterize the geometric space of shears and ellipticity, then use this geometric interpretation…
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…
Dedicated 'Stage IV' observatories will soon observe the entire extragalactic sky, to measure the 'cosmic shear' distortion of galaxy shapes by weak gravitational lensing. To measure the apparent shapes of those galaxies, we present an…
Given a galaxy image, one cannot simply measure its flexion. An image's spin one and three shape properties, typically associated with F- and G-flexion, are actually complicated functions of the galaxy's intrinsic shape and the telescope's…
We present a new shear estimator for weak lensing observations which properly accounts for the effects of a realistic point spread function (PSF). Images of faint galaxies are subject to gravitational shearing followed by smearing with the…
Weak gravitational lensing has the potential to constrain cosmological parameters to high precision. However, as shown by the Shear TEsting Programmes (STEP) and GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing (GREAT) Challenges, measuring galaxy…
Kinematic weak lensing describes the distortion of a galaxy's projected velocity field due to lensing shear, an effect recently reported for the first time by Gurri et al. based on a sample of 18 galaxies at $z \sim 0.1$. In this paper, we…
Flexion is the significant third-order weak gravitational lensing effect responsible for the weakly skewed and arc-like appearance of lensed galaxies. Here we demonstrate how flexion measurements can be used to measure galaxy halo density…
Weak lensing shear estimation typically results in per galaxy statistical errors significantly larger than the sought after gravitational signal of only a few percent. These statistical errors are mostly a result of shape-noise -- an…
(Abridged) Weak gravitational lensing induces distortions on the images of background galaxies, and thus provides a direct measure of mass fluctuations in the universe. Since the distortions induced by lensing on the images of background…
Weak gravitational lensing has proven to be a powerful tool to map directly the distribution of dark matter in the Universe. The technique, currently used, relies on the accurate measurement of the gravitational shear that corresponds to…
It is usually assumed that the ellipticity power spectrum measured in weak lensing observations can be expressed as an integral over the underlying matter power spectrum. This is true at second order in the gravitational potential. We…
Gravitational flexion, caused by derivatives of the gravitational tidal field, is potentially important for the analysis of the dark-matter distribution in gravitational lenses, such as galaxy clusters or the dark-matter haloes of galaxies.…
Current theories of structure formation predict specific density profiles of galaxy dark matter haloes, and with weak gravitational lensing we can probe these profiles on several scales. On small scales, higher-order shape distortions known…
One of the most powerful techniques to study the dark sector of the Universe is weak gravitational lensing. In practice, to infer the reduced shear, weak lensing measures galaxy shapes, which are the consequence of both the intrinsic…
In this paper, we develop a new gravitational lensing inversion technique. While traditional approaches assume that the lensing field varies little across a galaxy image, we note that this variation in the field can give rise to a…
Cosmic shear is the distortion of images of distant galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure in the Universe. Such images are coherently deformed by the tidal field of matter inhomogeneities along the line of…
This paper details a description of the pattern of galaxy image distortion over the entire sky caused by the gravitational lensing which is the result of large scale inhomogeneities in our universe. We present a tensor spherical harmonic…