Strong Lens Time Delay Challenge: II. Results of TDC1
Abstract
We present the results of the first strong lens time delay challenge. The motivation, experimental design, and entry level challenge are described in a companion paper. This paper presents the main challenge, TDC1, which consisted of analyzing thousands of simulated light curves blindly. The observational properties of the light curves cover the range in quality obtained for current targeted efforts (e.g.,~COSMOGRAIL) and expected from future synoptic surveys (e.g.,~LSST), and include simulated systematic errors. \nteamsA\ teams participated in TDC1, submitting results from \nmethods\ different method variants. After a describing each method, we compute and analyze basic statistics measuring accuracy (or bias) , goodness of fit , precision , and success rate . For some methods we identify outliers as an important issue. Other methods show that outliers can be controlled via visual inspection or conservative quality control. Several methods are competitive, i.e., give , , and , with some of the methods already reaching sub-percent accuracy. The fraction of light curves yielding a time delay measurement is typically in the range 20--40\%. It depends strongly on the quality of the data: COSMOGRAIL-quality cadence and light curve lengths yield significantly higher than does sparser sampling. Taking the results of TDC1 at face value, we estimate that LSST should provide around 400 robust time-delay measurements, each with and , comparable to current lens modeling uncertainties. In terms of observing strategies, we find that and depend mostly on season length, while P depends mostly on cadence and campaign duration.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1409.1254,
title = {Strong Lens Time Delay Challenge: II. Results of TDC1},
author = {Kai Liao and Tommaso Treu and Phil Marshall and Christopher D. Fassnacht and Nick Rumbaugh and Gregory Dobler and Amir Aghamousa and Vivien Bonvin and Frederic Courbin and Alireza Hojjati and Neal Jackson and Vinay Kashyap and S. Rathna Kumar and Eric Linder and Kaisey Mandel and Xiao-Li Meng and Georges Meylan and Leonidas A. Moustakas and Tushar P. Prabhu and Andrew Romero-Wolf and Arman Shafieloo and Aneta Siemiginowska and Chelliah S. Stalin and Hyungsuk Tak and Malte Tewes and David van Dyk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1254},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
referee's comments incorporated; to appear in ApJ