COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS AND GRAVITATIONAL LENSING STATISTICS

Abstract

The general idea of determining cosmological parameters with gravitational lensing statistics is outlined, and then recent work---with an emphasis on applicability to all cosmological models, observational bias, better statistics and robustness testing through numerical simulations---is discussed with relevance to a scheme originally introduced by Kochanek to avoid some of the uncertainties which plague other methods. The main result is that the observations at present---and probably in the future as well---are more indicative of intrinsic scatter than a hint of the correct cosmological model.