English

Caustics in gravitational lensing by mixed binary systems

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-07-31 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We investigate binary lenses with 1/rn1/r^n potentials in the asymmetric case with two lenses with different indexes nn and mm. These kinds of potentials have been widely used in several contexts, ranging from galaxies with halos described by different power laws to lensing by wormholes or exotic matter. In this paper, we present a complete atlas of critical curves and caustics for mixed binaries, starting from the equal-strength case, and then exploring unequal-strength systems. We also calculate the transitions between all different topology regimes. Finally we find some useful analytic approximations for the wide binary case and for the extreme unequal-strength case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.15119,
  title  = {Caustics in gravitational lensing by mixed binary systems},
  author = {Valerio Bozza and Silvia Pietroni and Chiara Melchiorre},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.15119},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

25 pages, 18 figures, in press on Universe, special issue Gravitational Lensing and Optical Geometry: A Centennial Perspective

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:30:29.598Z