Related papers: The Chang-Refsdal Lens Revisited
Under the perturbative picture of planetary microlensing, the planet is considered to act as a uniform-shear Chang-Refsdal lens on one of the two images produced by the host star that comes close to the angular Einstein radius of the…
In Paper I we studied the theory of gravitational microlensing for a planar distribution of point masses. In this second paper, we extend the analysis to a three-dimensional lens distribution. First we study the lensing properties of…
Gravitational lensing magnification is maximal around caustics. At these source locations, an incoming wave from a point source would formally experience an infinite amplification in the high-frequency or geometric optics limit. This…
The transition of the binary gravitational lens from the equal mass case to small (planetary) mass ratios q is studied. It is shown how the limit of a (pure shear) Chang-Refsdal lens is approached, under what conditions the Chang-Refsdal…
The total amplification of a source inside a caustic curve of a binary lens is no less than 3. Here we show that the infimum amplification 3 is satisfied by a family of binary lenses where the source position is at the mid-point between the…
This work studies interference patterns created by simple lens models (point mass, Chang-Refsdal, and binary lens) in the wave optics regime, primarily in the context of lensing of gravitational waves (GWs) in the LIGO band at frequencies…
We investigate the caustic structure of a lens composed by a discrete number of point-masses, having mutual distances smaller than the Einstein radius of the total mass of the system. Along with the main critical curve, it is known that the…
Among the 25 planetary systems detected up to now by gravitational microlensing, there are two cases of a star with two planets, and two cases of a binary star with a planet. Other, yet undetected types of triple lenses include triple stars…
Studies of the inner regions of micro-lensed AGN during caustic crossing events have often relied upon the approximation that the magnification near a fold caustic is inversely proportional to the square root of the source-caustic distance.…
We review five often used quad lens models, each of which has analytical solutions and can produce four images at most. Each lens model has two parameters, including one that describes the intensity of non-dimensional mass density, and the…
In a quadruply imaged lens system the angular distribution of images around the lens center is completely described by three relative angles. We show empirically that in the 3D space of these angles, spanning 180 x 180 x 90 degrees, quads…
An arbitrary surface mass density of gravitational lens can be decomposed into multipole components. We simulate the ray-tracing for the multipolar mass distribution of generalized SIS (Singular Isothermal Sphere) model, based on the…
In the context of strong gravitational lensing, the magnification of image is of crucial importance to constrain various lens models. For several commonly used quadruple lens models, the magnification invariants, defined as the sum of the…
We study three-dimensional microlensing where two lenses are located at different distances along the line of sight. We formulate the lens equation in complex notations and recover several previous results. There are in total either 4 or 6…
We study strong gravitational lensing by spiral galaxies, modeling them as infinitely thin uniform disks embedded in singular isothermal spheres. We derive general properties of the critical curves and caustics analytically. The…
Numerical studies on the imaging and caustic properties of the singular isothermal sphere (SIS) under a wide range of external shear (from 0.0 to 2.0) are presented. Using a direct inverse-mapping formula for this lens system (Lee 2003), we…
We derive an analytic expression for the mean magnification due to strong gravitational lensing, using a simple lens model, a singular isothermal sphere embedded in an external shear field. We compute separate expressions for 2-image and…
We investigate the strong deflection limit of gravitational lensing by a Schwarzschild black hole embedded in an external gravitational field. The study of this model, analogous to the Chang & Refsdal lens in the weak deflection limit, is…
We study the critical curves, caustics, and multiple imaging due to one of the simplest many-body gravitational lens configurations: equal-mass point masses on the vertices of a regular polygon. Some examples of the critical curves and…
Gravitational lensing provides a unique and powerful probe of the mass distributions of distant galaxies. Four-image lens systems with fold and cusp configurations have two or three bright images near a critical point. Within the framework…