Table of Contents

Light deflection.- The general lens.- Microlensing.- Strong lensing by galaxies and galaxy clusters.- Weak lensing by virialized structures.- Weak lensing by the large-scale-structure.- Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

About the Author

Massimo Meneghetti is a researcher at INAF, Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Science of Bologna, Italy. He obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Padova and worked at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics of the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (USA). His research focuses on cosmology and structure formation to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the major components of the Universe, topics on which he has authored over 160 papers. In particular, he has taken major roles in several international projects that use gravitational lensing as a tool to investigate the matter distribution in cosmic structures like galaxies and galaxy clusters and to explore the distant universe. He taught gravitational lensing to master students in Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Bologna for more than ten years, during this period he developed the lecture notes contained in this book.