Estimating cosmological parameters from future gravitational lens surveys

Understand

Upcoming ground and space based observatories such as the DES, the LSST, the JDEM concepts and the SKA, promise to dramatically increase the size of strong gravitational lens samples.

• A significant fraction of the systems are expected to be time delay lenses.
• Many of the existing lensing degeneracies become less of an issue with large samples since the distributions of a number of parameters are predictable, and can be incorporated into an analysis, thus helping to lessen the degeneracy.
• Assuming a mean galaxy density profile that does not evolve with redshift, a Lambda-CDM cosmology, and Gaussian distributions for bulk parameters describing the lens and source populations, we generate synthetic lens catalogues and examine the relationship between constraints on the Omega_m - Omega_Lambda plane and H_0 with increasing lens sample size.