Calendar of Events

Speaker:  Georgios Vernardo, American Museum of Natural History/CUNY

Abstract: Galaxy-galaxy lensing is considered a very promising probe for a variety of studies: galaxy evolution studies through the interplay of dark and baryonic matter (which affect cosmography with time delays), detection of substructures down to the low mass regime where theoretical dark matter models diverge (e.g. WDM vs CDM), and study of high redshift lensed galaxies. To achieve these goals, one needs to infer/reconstruct the mass profile of the lens and the brightness profile of the lensed source based solely on the observed flux per pixel and the lens equation. This is a complicated inverse problem that depends crucial on regularization/prior assumptions. In this presentation, I will discuss how our understanding of such models can shift due to different such assumptions and/or regularization methods. I will present recent studies of systematic biases and their impact on substructure detection. Finally, I will discuss how we can proceed in the context of analyzing the thousands of gravitational lenses that are already starting to pour in from surveys like Euclid and LSST.

Host: Matt Buckley