COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS AND GRAVITATIONAL LENSING STATISTICS

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.