TAPIR Seminar
Friday, November 13, 2:00pm, 370 Cahill

Ali Vanderveld, Caltech/JPL

"Testing General Relativity on Cosmological Scales with Weak Gravitational Lensing"

Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of modifications of General Relativity
on cosmological scales, since such modifications can affect both how matter produces
gravitational potential wells and how photons move within these wells. I will discuss
alternative theories of gravitation and how we may constrain such theories using weak
lensing observables, including those that could be obtained with the balloon-borne High
Altitude Lensing Observatory (HALO). I will also discuss the "parametrized-post-Friedmannian"
approach for obtaining model-independent constraints, in which new parameters are introduced
to characterize the departure from General Relativity on large scales.