No Arabic abstract
Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo could observe the first lensed gravitational waves in the coming years, while the future Einstein Telescope could observe hundreds of lensed events. Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors can resolve arrival time differences of the order of the inverse of the observed frequencies. As LIGO/Virgo frequency band spans from a few $rm Hz$ to a few $ rm kHz$, the typical time resolution of current interferometers is of the order of milliseconds. When microlenses are embedded in galaxies or galaxy clusters, lensing can become more prominent and result in observable time delays at LIGO/Virgo frequencies. Therefore, gravitational waves could offer an exciting alternative probe of microlensing. However, currently, only a few lensing configurations have been worked out in the context of gravitational-wave lensing. In this paper, we present lensingGW, a Python package designed to handle both strong and microlensing of compact binaries and the related gravitational-wave signals. This synergy paves the way for systematic parameter space investigations and the detection of arbitrary lens configurations and compact sources. We demonstrate the working mechanism of lensingGW and its use to study microlenses embedded in galaxies.
We describe a new open source package for calculating properties of galaxy clusters, including NFW halo profiles with and without the effects of cluster miscentering. This pure-Python package, cluster-lensing, provides well-documented and easy-to-use classes and functions for calculating cluster scaling relations, including mass-richness and mass-concentration relations from the literature, as well as the surface mass density $Sigma(R)$ and differential surface mass density $DeltaSigma(R)$ profiles, probed by weak lensing magnification and shear. Galaxy cluster miscentering is especially a concern for stacked weak lensing shear studies of galaxy clusters, where offsets between the assumed and the true underlying matter distribution can lead to a significant bias in the mass estimates if not accounted for. This software has been developed and released in a public GitHub repository, and is licensed under the permissive MIT license. The cluster-lensing package is archived on Zenodo (Ford 2016). Full documentation, source code, and installation instructions are available at http://jesford.github.io/cluster-lensing/.
We present a newly developed software package which implements a wide range of routines frequently used in Weak Gravitational Lensing (WL). With the continuously increasing size of the WL scientific community we feel that easy to use Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for common calculations are a necessity to ensure efficiency and coordination across different working groups. Coupled with existing open source codes, such as CAMB and Gadget2, LensTools brings together a cosmic shear simulation pipeline which, complemented with a variety of WL feature measurement tools and parameter sampling routines, provides easy access to the numerics for theoretical studies of WL as well as for experiment forecasts. Being implemented in python, LensTools takes full advantage of a range of state--of--the art techniques developed by the large and growing open--source software community (scipy,pandas,astropy,scikit-learn,emcee). We made the LensTools code available on the Python Package Index and published its documentation on http://lenstools.readthedocs.io
Assessing the probability that two or more gravitational waves (GWs) are lensed images of the same source requires an understanding of the image properties, including their relative phase shifts in strong lensing (SL). For non-precessing, circular binaries dominated by quadrupole radiation these phase shifts are degenerate with either a shift in the coalescence phase or a detector and inclination dependent shift in the orientation angle. This degeneracy is broken by the presence of higher harmonic modes with $|m| e 2$ in the former and $|m| e l$ in the latter. Precession or eccentricity will also break this degeneracy. This implies that lensed GWs will not necessarily be consistent with (unlensed) predictions from general relativity (GR). Therefore, unlike EM lensing, GW SL can lead to images with an observable modified phase evolution. However, for a wide parameter space, the lensed waveform is similar enough to an unlensed waveform that detection pipelines will still find it. For present detectors, templates with a shifted detector-dependent orientation angle have SNR differences of less than $1%$ for mass ratios up to 0.1, and less than $5%$ for precession parameters up to 0.5 and eccentricities up to 0.4 at 20Hz. The mismatch is lower than $10%$ with the alternative detector-independent coalescence phase shift. Nonetheless, for a loud enough source, even with one image it may be possible to directly identify it as a SL image from its non-GR waveform. In more extreme cases, lensing may lead to considerable distortions, and the lensed GWs may be undetected with current searches. Nevertheless, an exact template with a phase shift in Fourier space can always be constructed to fit any lensed GW. We conclude that an optimal search strategy would incorporate phase information in all stages, with an exact treatment in the final assessment of the probability of multiple lensed events.
High-resolution optical integral field units (IFUs) are rapidly expanding our knowledge of extragalactic emission nebulae in galaxies and galaxy clusters. By studying the spectra of these objects -- which include classic HII regions, supernova remnants, planetary nebulae, and cluster filaments -- we are able to constrain their kinematics (velocity and velocity dispersion). In conjunction with additional tools, such as the BPT diagram, we can further classify emission regions based on strong emission-line flux ratios. LUCI is a simple-to-use python module intended to facilitate the rapid analysis of IFU spectra. LUCI does this by integrating well-developed pre-existing python tools such as astropy and scipy with new machine learning tools for spectral analysis (Rhea et al. 2020). Furthermore, LUCI provides several easy-to-use tools to access and fit SITELLE data cubes.
lenstronomy is an Astropy-affiliated Python package for gravitational lensing simulations and analyses. lenstronomy was introduced by Birrer and Amara (2018) and is based on the linear basis set approach by Birrer et a. (2015). The user and developer base of lenstronomy has substantially grown since then, and the software has become an integral part of a wide range of recent analyses, such as measuring the Hubble constant with time-delay strong lensing or constraining the nature of dark matter from resolved and unresolved small scale lensing distortion statistics. The modular design has allowed the community to incorporate innovative new methods, as well as to develop enhanced software and wrappers with more specific aims on top of the lenstronomy API. Through community engagement and involvement, lenstronomy has become a foundation of an ecosystem of affiliated packages extending the original scope of the software and proving its robustness and applicability at the forefront of the strong gravitational lensing community in an open source and reproducible manner.