Cosmology with Strong Gravitational Lenses

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• Phil Marshal (KIPAC, Stanford University)
• Wednesday 13 May 2015, 14:30-15:30
• Physics West 117.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ilya Mandel.

Strong gravitational lenses have become an important astronomical tool: they allow us to make accurate measurements of galaxy masses, they provide a magnified view of the distant universe, and they allow us to constrain cosmological parameters. In particular, the time delays in multiply-imaged quasar systems enable measurements of distance in the Universe each with around 5% precision. I will present our recent measurement of time delay distance in two galaxy-scale lens systems. For us to realize the potential of this cosmological probe, we need to increase the size of our lens sample, and continue to improve the accuracy of its analysis. I will discuss the potential of LSST to provide a sample of several hundred lensed quasars with well-measured time delays that would enable competitive and complementary constraints on Dark Energy, and describe our ongoing investigations of how to find lenses, infer their time delays and model their mass distributions accurately, and account for weak lensing effects from external mass structures.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Talks Series series.

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• Astrophysics Talks Series
• Bham Talks
• Physics West 117
• What's on in Physics?

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