Dinesh Loomba, Assistant Professor
Research Interests:
I am a member of the Deep Lens Survey collaboration (Tony Tyson, PI, at Bell Labs).
The project involves making an ultra-deep multiband optical survey of seven 4 square
degree fields. The main goal of the survey is to produce unbiased maps of the large-scale
structure of the mass distribution beyond the local universe. The shear of the images of
distant galaxies induced by the mass of foreground structures will be measured.
These weak-lensing observations are sensitive to all forms of clumped mass and will
yield unbiased mass maps with resolution of one arcmin in the plane of the sky (about
120 kpc/h at z = 0.2), in multiple redshift ranges. These maps will measure for the first
time the evolution in large scale structure from z=1 to the present epoch, and will provide
a test of the current theories of structure formation. These observations will directly
constrain the clustering properties of matter, most notably Omega_matter and Omega_Lambda,
and, when compared with the results from microwave background anisotropy missions, will
test the basic theory of structure formation via gravitational instability. Further
details can be found at the Deep Lens Survey homepage. A reference to the first measurement
of the "cosmic shear" described here was reported by Wittman et al. (Nature 404 (2000) pp 143-148).
Gravitational lensing is one component of the nuclear, particle and particle-astrophysics
programs of the New Mexico Center for Particle Physics in the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.