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April 9, 2024 past

GAPP Seminar - Weak Gravitational Lensing from the Ground, the Stratosphere, and Space

339 Davey Lab

GAPP Seminar - Weak Gravitational Lensing from the Ground, the Stratosphere, and Space

Jacqueline McCleary, Northeastern University

The standard model of cosmology (aka L+Cold Dark Matter or LCDM) has successfully explained astrophysical observations as diverse as anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations, and the flatness of galaxy rotation curves. A key phenomenon within the LCDM framework is weak gravitational lensing, which describes the small distortions of more distant galaxies due to the gravitational influence of intervening matter. Gravitational lensing is thus a direct probe of all matter, dark and baryonic, offering insights into the universe's total mass densityWM and the clustering amplitude of cosmic structures (s8).

In this seminar, I will describe three very different campaigns to measure weak gravitational lensing signal from the ground (LoVoCCS), in the stratosphere (SuperBIT), and from space (COSMOS-Web). The discussion will focus on the unique features of each of these observational programs, how they advance our ability to constrainWM and s8,and what they could ultimately contribute to our evolving understanding of dark matter's role in structure formation.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2024-09-04 14:00 Jacqueline McCleary Weak Gravitational Lensing from the Ground, the Stratosphere, and Space
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.