ACKS Seminar by Joerg Dietrich (U Michigan)

Cosmic Shear, the distortion of faint background galaxies by the tidal
gravitational field of the cosmic large-scale structure, has the
potential to give the tightest constraints on the Dark Energy equation
of state. In this talk I will give an overview of the current Cosmic
Shear methods and results, which presently are limited to two-point
statistics. I will then present a new higher-order method we recently
developed to constrain cosmological parameters with weak gravitational
lensing, called the "shear-peak statistics". This method is expected
to give constraints that are competitive with current Cosmic Shear
methods, and even more powerful when combined with them.