Abstract:
Gravitational lensing is brightening of background objects due to deflection of light by foreground
sources. Rich clusters of galaxies are very effective lenses because they are centrally concentrated. Such natural
Gravitational Telescopes provide us with strongly magnified galaxies at high redshifts otherwise too faint to be
detected or analyzed. With a lensing boost, we can study galaxies shining at the end of the “Dark Ages”.
We propose to exploit the opportunity provided by the large field of view and depth, to search for sources
magnified by foreground clusters in the vicinity of the cluster critical curves, where enhancements can be of
several tens in brightness. Another aspect is microlensing (ML), where we would like to continue our survey of
a number of Galactic globular clusters over time-scales of weeks to years to search for ML events from planets
to hypothesized central intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH).
