A New Survey for Giant Arcs

We report on the first results of an imaging survey for strong gravitational lensing which targets the richest optically selected clusters selected from photometric data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for follow-up deep imaging observations from the Wisconsin Indiana Yale NOAO 3.5m telescope and the University of Hawaii 88-inch telescope. The clusters are selected from an area of 8000 deg^2 using the Red Cluster Sequence technique and span the redshift range 0.1 Gpc^3. Our imaging survey thus targets a volume more than an order of magnitude larger than any previous search. A total of 240 clusters were imaged of which 141 had sub-arcsecond image quality. Our survey has uncovered 16 new lensing clusters with definite giant arcs, an additional 12 tentative systems for which the lensing interpretation is very likely, and 9 systems which contain shorter arclets or candidate arcs which are less certain and will require further observations to confirm their lensing origin. The number of new cluster lenses presented here is likely > 30. Among these new systems are some of the most dramatic examples of gravitational lensing ever discovered with multiple bright arcs at large angular separation. They will likely become `poster-child' gravitational lenses similar to Abell 1689 and CL0024+1654