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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker: Jörg Dietrich (Physics Dept., Univ. of Michigan, USA)

Title: Weak Gravitational Lensing by Galaxy Clusters and the Large Scale Structure
Date: Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
Time: 15:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni

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Abstract: Weak gravitational lensing, the distortion of faint background galaxies by the tidal gravitational field of cosmic structures along the line-of-sight, has emerged as one of the premier methods of probing the dark matter distribution. In this talk I will discuss two applications of weak lensing: (1) The prospects for a direct mapping of large-scale structure filaments and the evidence we have for the presence of a dark matter filament in the Abell 222/223 supercluster; (2) A new method we recently developed to constrain cosmological parameters with weak gravitational lensing, which makes use of present day non-Gaussianity. This method, called the "shear-peak statistics", is expected to give constraints that are competitive with current cosmic shear methods, and even more powerful when combined with them.
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contact: Andrea Biviano (OATS)