The Search for Matter with Gravitational Lensing

Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool to detect compact matter on very different mass scales. Of particular importance is the fact that lensing is sensitive to both luminous and dark matter alike. Depending on the mass scale, all lensing effects are used in the search for matter: offset in position, image distortion, magnification, and multiple images. Gravitational lens detections cover three main mass ranges: roughly stellar mass, galaxy mass and galaxy cluster mass scales, i.e. well known classes of objects. Various searches based on different techniques explored the frequency of compact objects over more than 15 orders of magnitude, so far mostly providing null results in mass ranges different from the ones just mentioned. Combined, the lensing results offer some interesting limits on the cosmological frequency of compact objects in the mass interval 10^{-3} <= M/M_odot <= 10^{15}, unfortunately still with some gaps in between. In the near future, further studies along these lines promise to fill the gaps and to push the limits further down, or they might even detect new object classes.