4 research outputs found
Cluster Lenses
Clusters of galaxies are the most recently assembled, massive, bound
structures in the Universe. As predicted by General Relativity, given their
masses, clusters strongly deform space-time in their vicinity. Clusters act as
some of the most powerful gravitational lenses in the Universe. Light rays
traversing through clusters from distant sources are hence deflected, and the
resulting images of these distant objects therefore appear distorted and
magnified. Lensing by clusters occurs in two regimes, each with unique
observational signatures. The strong lensing regime is characterized by effects
readily seen by eye, namely, the production of giant arcs, multiple-images, and
arclets. The weak lensing regime is characterized by small deformations in the
shapes of background galaxies only detectable statistically. Cluster lenses
have been exploited successfully to address several important current questions
in cosmology: (i) the study of the lens(es) - understanding cluster mass
distributions and issues pertaining to cluster formation and evolution, as well
as constraining the nature of dark matter; (ii) the study of the lensed objects
- probing the properties of the background lensed galaxy population - which is
statistically at higher redshifts and of lower intrinsic luminosity thus
enabling the probing of galaxy formation at the earliest times right up to the
Dark Ages; and (iii) the study of the geometry of the Universe - as the
strength of lensing depends on the ratios of angular diameter distances between
the lens, source and observer, lens deflections are sensitive to the value of
cosmological parameters and offer a powerful geometric tool to probe Dark
Energy. In this review, we present the basics of cluster lensing and provide a
current status report of the field.Comment: About 120 pages - Published in Open Access at:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j183018170485723/ . arXiv admin note:
text overlap with arXiv:astro-ph/0504478 and arXiv:1003.3674 by other author
The LSST-DESC 3x2pt tomography optimization challenge
This paper presents the results of the Rubin Observatory Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) 3x2pt tomography challenge, which served as a first step toward optimizing the tomographic binning strategy for the main DESC analysis. The task of choosing an optimal tomographic binning scheme for a photometric survey is made particularly delicate in the context of a metacalibrated lensing catalogue, as only the photometry from the bands included in the metacalibration process (usually riz and potentially g) can be used in sample definition. The goal of the challenge was to collect and compare bin assignment strategies under various metrics of a standard 3x2pt cosmology analysis in a highly idealized setting to establish a baseline for realistically complex follow-up studies; in this preliminary study, we used two sets of cosmological simulations of galaxy redshifts and photometry under a simple noise model neglecting photometric outliers and variation in observing conditions, and contributed algorithms were provided with a representative and complete training set. We review and evaluate the entries to the challenge, finding that even from this limited photometry information, multiple algorithms can separate tomographic bins reasonably well, reaching figures-of-merit scores close to the attainable maximum. We further find that adding the g band to riz photometry improves metric performance by ~15% and that the optimal bin assignment strategy depends strongly on the science case: which figure-of-merit is to be optimized, and which observables (clustering, lensing, or both) are included