Cosmological Research at ITA

Gravitational Lensing

• Strong lensing by galaxy clusters
  • formation of arcs in galaxy clusters
  • statistics of arcs and cosmological implications
  • diagnostics of galaxy clusters using arcs
• Weak lensing by galaxy clusters
  • detection of dark-matter halos using weak lensing
  • dependence of weak lensing on mass profiles
  • cosmological implications of weak lensing
  • statistics of weak-lensing effects
• Strong lensing by galaxies
  • effects of spiral disks on multiple imaging

Galaxy Clusters

• Hot gas in galaxy clusters
  • diagnostics of clusters from their X-ray emission
  • thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects
  • joint cluster analyses using multi-band data
• Magnetic fields in galaxy clusters
  • origin and evolution of cluster magnetic fields
  • non-thermal emission due to magnetic fields
  • Faraday rotation

Cosmology

• Structure formation
  • growth of dark-matter halos in different cosmological models
  • diagnostics for halo properties
• Dark matter and dark energy
  • matter distribution in dark halos
  • implications of dark energy for structure growth
  • observational consequences of dark-energy models
• Cosmic microwave background (CMB)
  • Gravitational lensing of the CMB
  • Secondary anisotropies and source detection

Planck Project

• software and algorithm development for the Planck satellite
• data centre for Planck at MPA
• scientific exploitation of Planck data