Gravitational Lensing by Absorber Systems
Monday  7 June, 2:30 pm, Curia II
Brice Menard (IAS, Princeton)
@: menard  AT ias.edu

During the last decade, gravitational lensing has become a great tool to
constrain the mass of various structures (exoplanets, stars, galaxies,
clusters, large-scale structures, etc.) and has significantly improved
our knowledge for many of these systems.
I will show that lensing can also be used in order to probe the mass
distribution of high redshift absorbers seen in quasar spectra. I will
present a method to measure the signal due to magnification effects and
apply it to a large sample of SDSS quasar spectra. I will derive some
constraints on the mass and dust content of MgII absorber systems at
z=0.5-2.