Hendrik Hildebrandt
University of British Columbia
Abstract:
Weak gravitational lensing is one of the major methods to study the dark sector of the Universe on a large variety of mass- and length-scales. So far most observations employed the shear effect of weak lensing. Recently, it has been shown that also the magnification effect can be turned into a powerful, complimentary tool. In this talk I will review the theory behind magnification measurements and highlight advantages and weaknesses of this approach in comparison to shear-based measurements. Furthermore, I will present observations of weak lensing magnification induced by galaxies and galaxy clusters and explain how those will help us to answer open questions in the fields of galaxy-evolution and cluster-astrophysics as well as in cosmology.