Related papers: Simulating Weak Lensing by Clusters and Large-Scal…
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…
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…
The available probes of the large scale structure in the Universe have distinct properties: galaxies are a high resolution but biased tracer of mass, while weak lensing avoids such biases but, due to low signal-to-noise ratio, has poor…
We use a strong lensing inversion in the cluster of galaxies AC 114 to derive constraints on the cosmological parameters Omega_M0 and Omega_Lambda. If it is possible to measure spectroscopically the redshifts of many multiple images then…
We quantify the uncertainty in weak lensing mass estimates of clusters of galaxies, caused by distant (uncorrelated) large scale structure along the line of sight. We find that the effect is fairly small for deep observations (20<R<26) of…
We investigate the potentiality of using strong lensing clusters to constrain the cosmological parameters Omega_m and Omega_lambda. The existence of a multiple image system with known redshift allows, for a given (Omega_m, Omega_lambda)…
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…
Weak gravitational lensing is an important tool to estimate the masses of galaxy clusters, as it allows us to directly access their projected surface mass density along the line-of-sight (LOS) in a manner largely independent of their…
Cosmological inference from cluster number counts is systematically limited by the accuracy of the mass calibration, i.e. the empirical determination of the mapping between cluster selection observables and halo mass. In this work we…
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…
We explore the ability of weak lensing surveys to locate massive clusters. We use both analytic models of dark matter halos and mock weak lensing surveys generated from a large cosmological N-body simulation. The analytic models describe…
In this talk I review some of the key questions that weak lensing observations of clusters can potentially answer, and sketch the progress that has been made to date in extracting quantitative estimates of masses and density profiles. A…
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…
Future weak lensing surveys will directly probe the density fluctuation in the universe. Recent studies have shown how the statistics of the weak lensing convergence field is related to the statistics of collapsed objects. Extending earlier…
We quantify the performance of mass mapping techniques on mock imaging and gravitational lensing data of galaxy clusters. The optimum method depends upon the scientific goal. We assess measurements of clusters' radial density profiles,…
We discuss a new method which is potentially capable of constraining cosmological parameters using observations of giant luminous arcs in rich X-ray clusters of galaxies. The mass profile and the mass normalization of the lenses are…
The coherent image distortions induced by weak gravitational lensing can be used to measure the power spectrum of density inhomogeneities in the universe. We present our on-going effort to detect this effect with the FIRST radio survey,…
We present a new method for estimating galaxy cluster masses using weak-lensing magnification. The effect of weak-lensing magnification introduces a correlation between the position of foreground galaxy clusters and the density of…
We derive constraints on the matter density \Om and the amplitude of matter clustering \sig8 from measurements of large scale weak lensing (projected separation R=5-30\hmpc) by clusters in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey MaxBCG catalog. The…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak gravitational lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-convergence…