Abstract:
The unknown nature of dark matter is one of the major questions facing physics and astronomy. One of the main astrophysical approaches to investigate dark matter is to determine the statistics of low-mass clumps of dark matter in a mass regime where alternate dark matter models make different predictions than the standard cold dark matter paradigm. Strong gravitational lensing can provide critical information about the nature of dark matter because it can detect dark matter distributions in the Universe even if they are not luminous. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss the more traditional gravitational lensing technique, which utilizes the flux ratios of gravitationally lensed quasars, and show that this approach may be affected by complexity in the overall mass distribution of the primary lensing galaxy. In the second part of the talk, I will present the gravitational imaging technique and discuss how new sky surveys can enhance the potential impact of this approach.