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Alexie Leauthaud
Physics Division, MS 50R5004 Affiliation for publications: LBNL &
Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Research Interests: Weak Gravitational Lensing, Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing, Dark Matter, Galaxy Formation, Large-Scale Structure, Groups and Clusters of Galaxies. Research Description: I probe the dark universe via measurements of weak gravitational lensing, the deflection of light from distant galaxies by intervening gravitational potentials. This is a purely geometrical effect, free from astrophysical biases and sensitive to all mass - regardless of its baryonic or dark form. Mounting observational evidence for dark matter and dark energy represent a challenge to the standard model of particle physics and General Relativity's prediction for the behaviour of gravity on large scales. Gravitational lensing techniques have a uniquely dual ability to probe both the growth of structure (which is dominated by the distribution of dark matter) as well as the geometrical distance-redshift relation (which traces the expansion history of the universe and can thus distinguish between a cosmological constant and more esoteric forms of dark energy). Given that all of existing scientific knowledge concerns the baryons, determining the nature of dark matter and dark energy is widely viewed as one of the most outstanding problems in physics. My current work is focused on lensing measurements with COSMOS, the largest contiguous HST survey to date. In particular, I am interested in using the galaxy-galaxy lensing technique in order to probe the relation between galaxies and the dark matter halos in which they reside. As part of my thesis project, I created the COSMOS ACS catalog which is now publicly available. You can access this catalog via the link on the right hand side of this page. For more details on this catalog, please look at Leauthaud et al. 2007.
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