Weak/statistical lensing

4.5 Weak/statistical lensing

In contrast to the phenomena that were mentioned so far, “weak lensing” deals with effects of light deflection that cannot be measured individually, but rather in a statistical way only. As was discussed above “strong lensing” – usually defined as the regime that involves multiple images, high magnifications, and caustics in the source plane – is a rare phenomenon. Weak lensing on the other hand is much more common. In principle, weak lensing acts along each line of sight in the universe, since each photon’s path is affected by matter inhomogeneities along or near its path. It is just a matter of how accurate we can measure (cf. [142

]).

Any non-uniform matter distribution between our observing point and distant light sources affects the measurable properties of the sources in two different ways: The angular size of extended objects is changed and the apparent brightness of a source is affected, as was first formulated in 1967 by Gunn [71 , 72 ].

A weak lensing effect can be a small deformation of the shape of a cosmic object, or a small modification of its brightness, or a small change of its position. In general the latter cannot be observed, since we have no way of knowing the unaffected position⁹ .

The first two effects – slight shape deformation or small change in brightness – in general cannot be determined for an individual image. Only when averaging over a whole ensemble of images it is possible to measure the shape distortion, since the weak lensing (due to mass distributions of large angular size) acts as the coherent deformation of the shapes of extended background sources.

The effect on the apparent brightness of sources shows that weak lensing can be both a blessing and a curse for astronomers: The statistical incoherent lens-induced change of the apparent brightness of (widely separated) “standard candles” – like type Ia supernovae – affects the accuracy of the determination of cosmological parameters [62 , 88 , 196 ].

The idea to use the weak distortion and tangential alignment of faint background galaxies to map the mass distribution of foreground galaxies and clusters has been floating around for a long time. The first attempts go back to the years 1978/79, when Tyson and his group tried to measure the positions and orientations of the then newly discovered faint blue galaxies, which were suspected to be at large distances. Due to the not quite adequate techniques at the time (photographic plates), these efforts ended unsuccessfully [183 , 189 ]. Even with the advent of the new technology of CCD cameras, it was not immediately possible to detect weak lensing, since the pixel size originally was relatively large (of order an arcsecond). Only with smaller CCD pixels, improved seeing conditions at the telecope sites and improved image quality of the telescope optics the weak lensing effect could ultimately be measured.

Weak lensing is one of the two sub-disciplines within the field of gravitational lensing with the highest rate of growth in the last couple of years (along with galactic microlensing). There are a number of reasons for that:

The availability of astronomical sites with very good seeing conditions.
The availability of large high resolution cameras with fields of view of half a degree at the moment (aiming for more).
The availability of methods to analyse these coherent small distortions.
The awareness of both observers and time allocation committees about the potential of these weak lensing analyses for extragalactic research and cosmology.

Now we will briefly summarize the technique of how to use the weak lensing distortion in order to get the mass distribution of the underlying matter.

4.5.1 Cluster mass reconstruction

The first real detection of a coherent weak lensing signal of distorted background galaxies was measured in 1990 around the galaxy clusters Abell 1689 and CL1409+52 [184 ]. It was shown that the orientation of background galaxies – the angle of the semi-major axes of the elliptical isophotes relative to the center of the cluster – was more likely to be tangentially oriented relative to the cluster than radially. For an unaffected population of background galaxies one would expect no preferential direction. This analysis is based on the assumption that the major axes of the background galaxies are intrinsically randomly oriented.

With the elegant and powerful method developed by Kaiser and Squires [87 ] the weak lensing signal can be used to quantitatively reconstruct the surface mass distribution of the cluster. This method relies on the fact that the convergence $κ(𝜃)$ and the two components of the shear $γ1(𝜃)$ , $γ2(𝜃)$ are linear combinations of the second derivative of the effective lensing potential $Ψ (𝜃)$ (cf. Equations (33 , 34 , 35 )). After Fourier transforming the expressions for the convergence and the shear one obtains linear relations between the transformed components $&tidle;κ$ , $&tidle;γ 1$ , $&tidle;γ 2$ . Solving for $&tidle;κ$ and inverse Fourier transforming gives an estimate for the convergence $κ$ (details can be found in [87 , 86 , 126 ] or [178 ]).

The original Kaiser-Squires method was improved/modified/extended/generalized by various authors subsequently. In particular the constraining fact that observational data are available only in a relatively small, finite area was implemented. Maximum likelihood techniques, non-linear reconstructions as well as methods using the amplification effect rather than the distortion effect complement each other. Various variants of the mass reconstruction technique have been successfully applied to more than a dozen rich clusters by now.

Descriptions of various techniques and applications for the cluster mass reconstruction can be found in, e.g., [1 , 15 , 17 , 19 , 29 , 33 , 73 , 85 , 127 , 168 , 171 , 172 , 174 , 206 ]. In Figure 19 a recent example for the reconstructed mass distribution of galaxy cluster CL1358+62 is shown [75 ].

Figure 19: The reconstructed mass distribution of cluster CL1358+62 from a weak lensing analysis is shown as contour lines superposed on the image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope [75 ]. The map is smoothed with a Gaussian of size 24 arcsec (see shaded circle). The center of the mass distribution agrees with the central elliptical galaxy. The numbers indicate the reconstructed surface mass density in units of the critical one. (Credits: Henk Hoekstra.)

Going further. We could present here only one weak lensing issue in some detail: the reconstruction of the mass distribution of galaxy clusters from weakly distorted background images. Many more interesting weak lensing applications are under theoretical and observational investigation, though. To name just a few:
- Constraints on the distribution of the faint galaxies from weak lensing (e.g., [60 , 113 ]);
- galaxy-galaxy lensing (e.g., [31 ]);
- lensing by galaxy halos in clusters (e.g., [128 ]);
- weak lensing effect by large scale structure and/or detection of dark matter concentrations; this considers both shear effects as well as magnification effects (e.g. [12 , 16 , 166 , 204 ]);
- determination of the power spectrum of the matter distribution (e.g. [21 ]); or
- the weak lensing effects on the cosmic microwave background (e.g. [119 , 122 , 173 ]).
An upcoming comprehensive review on weak lensing by Schneider & Bartelmann [20 ] treats both theory and applications of weak lensing in great depths.