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Session 82 - Gravitational Lensing & Dark Matter.
Oral session, Wednesday, January 15
Frontenac Ballroom,
Weak gravitational lensing of background sources by clusters of galaxies provides a unique tool to measure the projected surface mass densities of clusters, independent of the internal cluster dynamics or substructure. Such measurements tend to be lower limits, due in part to the limitation that a mass density distribution with a small gradient (such as an extended cluster halo) cannot be measured locally from the shear. New measurements of the surface mass density out to large radii (up to several h^-1 Mpc) will be presented for several clusters, as well as estimates of the radial M/L profiles. Implications of these results and limitations of the technique will be discussed.
