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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker: Martin Kilbinger (CEA Saclay, France)
Title: Exploring the dark Universe with weak gravitational lensing. Results
from CFHTLenS
Date: Thursday, February 20th, 2014
Time: 14:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni
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Abstract In my talk I will cover a wide range of applications of weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure in the Universe. By measuring the minute distortions of the images of high-redshift galaxies caused by the tidal gravitational field along the line of sight, weak lensing is a powerful probe
of the dark matter distribution on very large scales.
I will show examples from the recently completed CFHT Lensing Survey
(CFHTLenS), whose data are publicly available at www.cfhtlens.org. This
includes cases where weak lensing is combined with observations in optical
and other wavelengths to connect the dark and the luminous Universe. Lensing
probes galaxy halos out to large distances, and measures the relations between
luminous and total matter. In the case of galaxy clusters, weak lensing helps
to establish scaling relations, e.g. between optical richness, concentration,
and mass. Further, weak lensing has recently been correlated with SZ maps to
detect warm, diffuse baryons on large scales.
Weak lensing has become a major tool to measure a variety of cosmological
parameters, for example, the density fluctuation amplitude, the mass of
neutrinos, and dark energy. It is also a very promising technique to constrain
models of modified gravity, which will be a major task for the space-mission
Euclid.
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Contact: Stefano Borgani (OATS)