Galaxy-galaxy Lensing as a Probe of Galaxy Dark Matter Halos

Gravitational lensing has now become a popular tool to measure the mass distribution of structures in the Universe on various scales. Here we focus on the study of galaxy’s scale dark matter halos with galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques: observing the shapes of distant background galaxies which have been lensed by foreground galaxies allows us to map the mass distribution of the foreground galaxies. The lensing effect is small compared to the intrinsic ellipticity distribution of galaxies, thus a statistical approach is needed to derive some constraints on an average lens population. An advantage of this method is that it provides a probe of the gravitational potential of the halos of galaxies out to very large radii, where few classical methods are viable, since dynamical and hydrodynamical tracers of the potential cannot be found at this radii. We will begin by reviewing the detections of galaxy-galaxy lensing obtained so far. Next we will present a maximum likelihood analysis of simulated data we performed to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of constraints that can be obtained on galaxy halo properties. Then we will apply this method to study the properties of galaxies which stand in massive cluster lenses at z ∼ 0.2. The main result of this work is to find dark matter halos of cluster galaxies to be significantly more compact compared to dark matter halos around field galaxies of equivalent luminosity, in agreement with early galaxy-galaxy lensing studies and with theoretical expectations, in particular with the tidal stripping scenario. We thus provide a strong confirmation of tidal truncation from a homogeneous sample of galaxy clusters. Moreover, it is the first time that cluster galaxies are probed successfully using galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques from ground based data.