Studies of gravitational lens systems discovered in the Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey

This thesis describes research conducted on and inspired by the Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey (CLASS), which searches for new cases of gravitational lensing among compact radio sources. CLASS aims to provide the largest and best-studied sample of lens systems for use in constraining the properties of galaxy mass distributions, determining the Hubble parameter and placing limits on the cosmological constant. The goal of this thesis was to complete observations of the CLASS sample, discover and thoroughly investigate new lenses, and apply them to interesting astrophysical problems.; We begin with a detailed overview of the CLASS project, including scientific goals, the radio source sample, survey observations, candidate selection and follow-ups. Results are then presented from the third phase of the CLASS survey (CLASS-3), which yielded three new gravitational lens systems. 130850+054 and 131152+199 both consist of a pair of lensed images. 131359+154 features six images of a single source, and is the first arcsecond-scale system in which a source is lensed into more than four images. We also present observations and modeling of the CLASS-2 gravitational lens B2319+051.; We use the absence of detectable central images in deep radio maps of CLASS lens systems to place powerful constraints on the inner mass profiles of leasing galaxies. These analyses imply that the profile slopes cannot be much shallower than isothermal. Finally, we consider the relative frequency of two and four-image lens systems, and demonstrate that there is a statistically significant overdensity of quads in the CLASS sample. We investigate a range of factors that may be increasing the frequency of radio quads, including external shear fields, mass distributions flatter than the light, shallow leasing mass profiles, finite core radii, satellite galaxies, and alterations to the luminosity function for faint flat-spectrum radio sources. Surprisingly, none of these mechanisms provide a particularly compelling solution to the quad problem while remaining consistent with other observational constraints.