Related papers: Tests for Substructure in Gravitational Lenses
A galaxy cluster acts as a cosmic telescope over background galaxies but also as a cosmic microscope of the lens imperfections. The diverging magnification of lensing caustics enhances the microlensing effect of substructure present within…
Core formation and runaway core collapse in models with self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) significantly alter the central density profiles of collapsed halos. Using a forward modeling inference framework with simulated datasets, we…
Dark matter is an important ingredient of galaxies, as was recognised early on by Ken Freeman himself! Evidence for dark matter halos is still indirect, based on analysing motions of tracers such as gas and stars. In a sense the visible…
Gravitational microlensing is a unique probe of the stellar content in strong lens galaxies. Flux ratio anomalies from gravitationally lensed supernovae (glSNe), just like lensed quasars, can be used to constrain the stellar mass fractions…
If the dark matter halos of galaxies contain large numbers of subhalos as predicted by the $\Lambda$CDM model, these subhalos are expected to appear in strong galaxy--galaxy lens systems as small--scale perturbations in individual images.…
We study the statistical properties of magnification perturbations by substructures in strong lensed systems using linear perturbation theory and an analytical substructure model including tidal truncation and a continuous substructure mass…
We present an analysis of the ALMA long baseline science verification data of the gravitational lens system SDP.81. We fit the positions of the brightest clumps at redshift z=3.042 and a possible AGN component of the lensing galaxy at…
We investigate gravitational microlensing of point-like lenses surrounded by diffuse gas clouds. Besides gravitational bending, one must also consider refraction and absorption phenomena. According to the cloud density, the light curves may…
Flux ratio anomalies in quasar lenses can be attributed to dark matter substructure surrounding the lensing galaxy and, thus, used to constrain the substructure mass fraction. Previous applications of this approach infer a substructure…
Image flux ratio anomalies have been attributed to substructures within the gravitational lens and to small mass halos (M <~ 10^10 Msun) in intergalactic space. In this paper, analytic calculations are presented that help in the…
Strong gravitational lensing is a promising way of uncovering the nature of dark matter, by finding perturbations to images that cannot be well accounted for by modeling the lens galaxy without additional structure, be it subhalos (smaller…
Intrinsically cold particle dark matter inevitably creates halos with sharp discontinuities in projected surface density caused by the projection of fold catastrophes onto the sky. In principle, these imperfections can be detected and…
The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales.…
In the last decade the detection of individual massive dark matter sub-halos has been possible using potential correction formalism in strong gravitational lens imaging. Here we propose a statistical formalism to relate strong gravitational…
A new method for measuring gravitational lensing with high redshift type Ia supernovae is investigated. The method utilizes correlations between foreground galaxies and supernova brightnesses to substantially reduce possible systematic…
We investigate the frequency of two- and four-image gravitational lens systems in the Jodrell-VLA Astrometric Survey (JVAS) and Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey (CLASS), and the possible implications for dark matter halo properties. A simple…
Strong gravitational lensing can detect the presence of low-mass haloes and subhaloes through their effect on the surface brightness of lensed arcs. We carry out an extended analysis of the density profiles and mass distributions of two…
The nature of dark matter (DM) is still under intense debate. Sub-galactic scales are particularly critical, as different, currently viable DM models make diverse predictions on the expected abundance and density profile of DM haloes on…
Multiply-imaged quasar lenses can be used to constrain the substructure mass fraction in galaxy-sized dark matter halos via anomalous flux ratios in lensed images. The flux ratios, however, can be affected by both the substructure in the…
Many gravitationally lensed quasars exhibit flux ratio "anomalies" that cannot be explained under the hypothesis that the lensing potential is smooth on scales smaller than one kpc. Micro-lensing by stars is a natural source of granularity…