Abstract:

Gravitational lensing is a highly useful way to observe the total matter content of the universe, including dark matter. Given the strong observational support for the claim that most of the matter in the universe is dark, weak lensing is therefore a critical part of current and future observational cosmology efforts. In this talk, I will discuss several ways that lensing and other probes of large-scale structure may be used to robustly constrain cosmology. Some very new results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will serve as a proof of concept of these methods, which should be a very promising way forward with near-future surveys such as DES and HSC, and eventually LSST, WFIRST, and Euclid.