Matt Bayliss
University of Chicago
 

"Cosmological Constraints From Cluster-scale Gravitational Lenses: Leveraging New Large Lens Samples"
 

The RCS-2 and SDSS Giant Arc surveys have, in the past 1-2 years, discovered several hundred new cluster strong lenses with giant arcs. Most of these have been found in the past year and are largely unpublished. These discoveries increase the total sample of all known cluster strong lenses by an order of magnitude and offer unprecedented opportunity for progress on a number of unresolved questions. I will describe both samples, including a description of selection effects, and highlight some of the most spectacular systems found to date.  I will also present  a basic framework for recovering cosmological parameter constraints from large samples strong lensing clusters, focusing primarily on the distribution of various giant arc statistics, and apply our method to the preliminary sample of cluster lenses from the RCS-2 survey.