Orateur
Description
The strong gravitational lensing regime provides a unique probe of structure formation in the Universe. There has been significant effort to identify and characterize strong lensing clusters selected in the X-ray and optical wavelengths; here we extend such studies to a large sample of strong lensing clusters identified by the Sunyaev Zel'dovich (SZ) effect in >5,000 square degrees of South Pole Telescope (SPT) data. In this talk I will describe (i) the identification of the strong lensing subset of the SPT cluster sample using observations from the PISCO imager on the Magellan/Clay telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, (ii) first constraints on the mass-concentration relation of massive clusters using this dataset, and (iii) simulation efforts using large cosmological simulations to both generate predictions for the abundances of strong lenses in the SPT sample as well as to extract constraints from the observational data.
