Probing Dark Matter and Dark Energy with strong gravitational lensing

Evidence from different cosmological probes have lead to the establishment of the dark matter and dark energy paradigm. Dark matter dominates the matter budget at cosmological scales and drives the formation of structure and dark energy is responsible for the late time acceleration of the universe. To date, these phenomenas have purely been described as gravitational effects and no other evidence have provided convincing evidence for their underlying physical nature – remaining one of the most striking mysteries the universe has not yet revealed.

In my talk, I will describe the phenomena of strong gravitational lensing and how we can use this unique probe to constrain the physical nature of dark matter and dark energy. I am going to highlight recent results in both domains. I will then look in the near future and highlight the prospects of this technique with increasing sample size, analysis techniques and instrumentation.