Iras-allsky

IPAC Special Seminar: James Jee (UC Davis) Cosmic Shear Results from the Deep Lens Survey and Dark Matter in Merging Clusters

April
29
S M T W T F S

After providing a brief introduction to gravitational lensing using my water-n-ripple analogy, I will present a cosmic shear study from the Deep Lens Survey (DLS). DLS is a deep BVRz multi-band imaging survey of five 4 sq. degree fields with two National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) 4-meter telescopes at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo. I will highlight our extensive efforts to separate the instrumental systematics from real lensing signals, which is the major challenge for future cosmic shear surveys like LSST and EUCLID. The resulting cosmological parameters favored by the DLS cosmic shear analysis will be discussed. In the second part of the talk, I will show my Hubble Space Telescope (HST) weak-lensing study of merging galaxy clusters. Our HST weak lensing analysis provides high-resolution dark matter distribution, which reveals many interesting features that might help us to probe the nature of dark matter.

Date: April 29th, 2013
Location: MR LCR