Hands-on Strong Gravitational Lensing School

Overview

This is a 4-day practical school on strong gravitational lensing, designed for a maximum of 40 PhD and younger prospective graduate students in Astronomy and Physics. The aims of the school are diverse:

• to spread knowledge on the value of strong lensing to the young international astronomical community, beyond the small group of experienced students;
• to boost the productivity of students and to foster friendly collaboration with post-docs working actively in lensing;
• to encourage new scientific projects among the students and the invited/local speakers.

The school will be organised in the following way:

• in the mornings, experienced post-docs will give lectures on various topics related to the research fields in which they currently work;
• in the afternoons, students will be divided into two groups, depending on their level of expertise in strong gravitational lensing, and attend practical tutorials. They will model real lensing systems using some available lensing codes.

The group of students with little or no experience on strong gravitational lensing, will learn how to solve simple lensing systems (with pencil and paper) and will then be introduced to the basics of lensing modelling. The remaining students, working on strong lensing projects for their theses, will concentrate on more advanced analysis methods and discuss open problems encountered in their studies.

More details on the topics and the speakers are given on the Programme page.

This school is sponsored by the Excellence Cluster Universe