ITC Seminar - Simon Birrer (UCLA)

Date: 

Tuesday, March 5, 2019, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Pratt
Probing Dark Matter with strong gravitational lenses

Strong gravitational lensing offers an unique view on the small scale clustering of matter at cosmological distances at a regime where different dark matter scenarios can have diverting predictions based on the particle nature (e.g. self-interacting, thermal relic, fuzzy dark matter). Recently, strong lensing has became competitive with other probes, such as the local group and Lyman-alpha forest, in quantifying the smallest cosmological scales.

I present our recent result based on a forward modelling approach with Approximate Bayesian Computing to directly infer physical properties of dark matter from strong gravitational lensing data. We are able, based on the HST data of one single strong lens, to rule out a warm dark matter thermal relic mass below 2 keV at the 2σ confidence level. This result, in combination with the success of other techniques, applied on multiple strong lenses offers interesting constraints on the nature of dark matter in the near-term future at scales of 10^7 solar mass halos.

See also: Seminars, 2018 - 19