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General Information

Class time and place: MonWed 2:00 - 3:20pm, Humanities 3015

Instructor: Simon Birrer (simon.birrer 'at' stony brook.edu, ESS 457-A)

Office hours:

• Thu 4pm-5pm (ESS 457-A, Simon Birrer)

Textbooks: There is no textbook requirement for this class. To expand upon the material covered in class, the following textbooks are recommended:

• Introduction to Gravitational Lensing (with Python exampels); by M. Meneghetti (Springer Nature 2021)
• Schneider, Kochanek, Wambsganss: Gravitational Lensing: Strong, Weak and Micro. Proceedings of the Saas Fee lectures on Gravitational Lensing. The main chapters are also available on the web: strong, weak and micro.
• Schneider, Ehlers, Falco: Gravitational Lenses. The classic lensing textbook.
• Dodelson: Gravitational Lensing. New textbook.
• Mollerach and Roulet: Gravitational Lensing and Microlensing.

Prerequisites: None, though familiarity with basic astrophysical and cosmological concepts will be helpful. AST 203 (Astronomy): Students must be familiar with a broad range of astronomy topics. AST 347 (Cosmology): Students must be familiar with basic concepts in cosmology, such as the background metric. PHY 277 (Computation for Physics and Astronomy): Students must be familiar with Linux and bash, and have basic programming experience in the language of Python. Example code will be provided in Python.

Description

Gravitational lensing, the bending of light due to the space-time distortions predicted by General Relativity, is a unique phenomena to test the laws of Gravity, and has become a powerful cosmological probe. Gravitational lensing is the prime method to study the properties of dark matter on scales of galaxies and galaxy clusters; it can provide the statistically most representative census of exoplanet populations; and it can measure the composition and evolution history of the Universe.

The success story of lensing as an astrophysical tool is closely tied to technological advances, such as high-resolution imaging capabilities (e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, adaptive optics on large ground-based telescopes, radio interferometry), large telescopes and wide-field cameras, time-resolved photometry in crowded fields, as well as advanced statistical techniques. For a number of current and future large-scale astronomical surveys such as the Vera Rubin Observatory, the Euclid and Roman satellites, lensing is (one of) the main method(s) to constrain cosmology, i.e. to determine the properties of dark energy and dark matter.

This class will cover the lensing formalism, and discuss lensing applications and techniques. It will include a brief introduction of Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo Markov Chains (MCMC), and several opportunities to work with actual data to reproduce research at the frontier of current gravitational lensing science.

The content will be a mix of lectures, homework assignments, and projects at the forefront of science, including the use of recent science observations, and paper discussions.