We present the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Strong Lens Foundry. We discovered ∼3500 new strong gravitational lens candidates in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys using residual neural networks (ResNet). We observed a subset (51) of our candidates using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). All of them were confirmed to be strong lenses. We also briefly describe spectroscopic follow-up observations by DESI and Keck NIRES programs. From this very rich dataset, a number of studies will be carried out, including evaluating the quality of the ResNet search candidates and lens modeling. In this paper, we present our initial effort in these directions. In particular, as a demonstration, we present the lens model for DESI-165.4754-06.0423, with imaging data from HST, and lens and source redshifts from DESI and Keck NIRES, respectively. In this effort, we have applied a \emph{fully} forward-modeling Bayesian approach (GIGA-Lens), using \emph{multiple} GPUs, for the first time in both regards, to a strong lens with HST data, or any high resolution imaging.
@article{arxiv.2502.03455,
title = {DESI Strong Lens Foundry I: HST Observations and Modeling with GIGA-Lens},
author = {X. Huang and S. Baltasar and N. Ratier-Werbin and C. Storfer and W. Sheu and S. Agarwal and M. Tamargo-Arizmendi and D. J. Schlegel and J. Aguilar and S. Ahlen and G. Aldering and S. Banka and S. BenZvi and D. Bianchi and A. Bolton and D. Brooks and A. Cikota and T. Claybaugh and A. de la Macorra and A. Dey and P. Doel and J. Edelstein and A. Filipp and J. E. Forero-Romero and E. Gaztanaga and S. Gontcho A Gontcho and A. Gu and G. Gutierrez and K. Honscheid and E. Jullo and S. Juneau and R. Kehoe and D. Kirkby and T. Kisner and A. Kremin and K. J. Kwon and A. Lambert and M. Landriau and D. Lang and L. Le Guillou and J. Liu and A. Meisner and R. Miquel and J. Moustakas and A. D. Myers and S. Perlmutter and I. Perez-Rafols and F. Prada and G. Rossi and D. Rubin and E. Sanchez and M. Schubnell and Y. Shu and E. Silver and D. Sprayberry and N. Suzuki and G. Tarle and B. A. Weaver and H. Zou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.03455},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
32 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to The Astrophysical Journal