No Arabic abstract
Extremely light bosonic wave dark matter ($psi$DM) is an emerging dark matter candidate contesting the conventional cold dark matter paradigm and a model subject to intense scrutiny of late. This work for the first time reports testable salient features pertinent to gravitational lenses of $psi$DM halos. $psi$DM halos are distinctly filled with large-amplitude, small-scale density fluctuations with $deltarho/rho_{rm halo}sim 1$ in form of density granules. This halo yields ubiquitous flux ratio anomalies of a few tens of percent, as is typically found for lensed quasars, and may also produce rare hexad and octad images, for sources located in well-defined caustic zones. We have found new critical features appearing in the highly de-magnified lens center when the halo has sufficiently high surface density near a very compact massive core.
This note addresses possible applications of the Tikhonov regularization to image reconstruction of gravitational lens systems. Several modifications of the regularization algorithm are discussed. Our illustrative example is the close quadruple gravitational lens QSO 2237+0305 (Einstein Cross). The restored image of the lens is decomposed into two parts - the quasar components and the background galaxy.
Gravitational lens flux-ratio anomalies provide a powerful technique for measuring dark matter substructure in distant galaxies. However, before using these flux-ratio anomalies to test galaxy formation models, it is imperative to ascertain that the given anomalies are indeed due to the presence of dark matter substructure and not due to some other component of the lensing galaxy halo or to propagation effects. Here we present the case of CLASS~B1555+375, which has a strong radio-wavelength flux-ratio anomaly. Our high-resolution near-infrared Keck~II adaptive optics imaging and archival Hubble Space Telescope data reveal the lensing galaxy in this system to have a clear edge-on disc component that crosses directly over the pair of images that exhibit the flux-ratio anomaly. We find that simple models that include the disc can reproduce the cm-wavelength flux-ratio anomaly without requiring additional dark matter substructure. Although further studies are required, our results suggest the assumption that all flux-ratio anomalies are due to a population of dark matter sub-haloes may be incorrect, and analyses that do not account for the full complexity of the lens macro-model may overestimate the substructure mass fraction in massive lensing galaxies.
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 abundance that potentially in tension with the predictions of a $Lambda$CDM cosmology. However, the assumption that all flux ratio anomalies are due to substructure is a strong one, and alternative explanations have not been fully investigated. Here, we use new high-resolution near-IR Keck~II adaptive optics imaging for the lens system CLASS B0712+472 to perform pixel-based lens modelling for this system and, in combination with new VLBA radio observations, show that the inclusion of the disc in the lens model can explain the flux ratio anomalies without the need for dark matter substructures. The projected disc mass comprises 16% of the total lensing mass within the Einstein radius and the total disc mass is $1.79 times 10^{10} M_{sun}$. The case of B0712+472 adds to the evidence that not all flux ratio anomalies are due to dark subhaloes, and highlights the importance of taking the effects of baryonic structures more fully into account in order to obtain an accurate measure of the substructure mass fraction.
Recently, Meneghetti et al. reported an excess of small-scale gravitational lenses in galaxy clusters, compared to simulations of standard cold dark matter (CDM). We propose a self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) scenario, where a population of subhalos in the clusters experiences gravothermal collapse. Using controlled N-body simulations, we show the presence of early-type galaxies in substructures accelerates gravothermal evolution and a collapsed SIDM subhalo has a steeper density profile than its CDM counterpart, leading to a larger radial galaxy-galaxy strong lensing cross section and more lens images, in better agreement with the observations. Our results indicate that strong gravitational lensing can provide a promising test of the self-interacting nature of dark matter.
The extension of the singular perturbative approach to the second order is presented in this paper. The general expansion to the second order is derived. The second order expansion is considered as a small correction to the first order expansion. Using this approach it is demonstrated that the second order expansion is reducible to a first order expansion via a re-definition of the first order pertubative fields. Even if in practice the second order correction is small the reducibility of the second order expansion to the first order expansion indicates a degeneracy problem. In general this degeneracy is hard to break. A useful and simple second order approximation is the thin source approximation which offers a direct estimation of the correction. The practical application of the corrections derived in this paper are illustrated by using an elliptical NFW lens model. The second order pertubative expansion provides a noticeable improvement, even for the simplest case of thin source approximation. To conclude it is clear that for accurate modelisation of gravitational lenses using the perturbative method the second order perturbative expansion should be considered. In particular an evaluation of the degeneracy due to the second order term should be performed, for which the thin source approximation is particularly useful.