Learning about Aspects of Clusters and Cosmology from Weak and Strong Gravitational Lensing Approaches – Mandeep Gill

Date: Tue. April 12th, 2011, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller 221

I will cover several aspects of current astrophysics that can be probed by various regimes of lensing in simulations and data –from galaxy cluster substructure to what we can learn about cosmology from cluster weak lensing ensembles. Further, a new approach to extracting information from strongly lensed arc images that I have been involved with in recent times, and which is model-independent and has the potential to revolutionize approaches to strong lensing analyses and is very complementary to weak lensing analyses will be introduced. I will further briefly discuss initial lensing results from already-taken data of 6 clusters from the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, as well as projections for data coming from the Dark Energy Survey in Chile beginning late in 2011. Last, I will mention the launch of the GREAT10 project, and what potential it has to assist the worldwide lensing community in developing their toolkit for future cosmological analyses.