Multi-scale cluster lens mass mapping I. Strong Lensing modelling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-scale gravitational lensing model combining parametric and non-parametric methods to improve galaxy cluster mass mapping, demonstrated on Abell 1689 with halved positional errors.

Contribution

A novel multi-scale model integrating radial basis functions and galaxy potentials, enhancing resolution and accuracy in galaxy cluster mass reconstructions.

Findings

Halved errors in predicted vs. observed image positions.

Effective multi-scale approach improves fit quality.

Model is publicly available in the lenstool package.

Abstract

We propose a novel technique to refine the modelling of galaxy clusters mass distribution using gravitational lensing. The idea is to combine the strengths of both "parametric" and "non-parametric" methods to improve the quality of the fit. We develop a multi-scale model that allows sharper contrast in regions of higher density where the number of constraints is generally higher. Our model consists of (i) a multi-scale grid of radial basis functions with physically motivated profiles and (ii) a list of galaxy-scale potentials at the location of the cluster member galaxies. This arrangement of potentials of different sizes allows to reach a high resolution for the model with a minimum number of parameters. We apply our model to the well studied cluster Abell 1689. We estimate the quality of our mass reconstruction with a Bayesian MCMC sampler. For a selected subset of multiple images, we manage to halve the errors between the predicted and observed image positions compared to previous studies. This owes to the flexibility of multi-scale models at intermediate scale between cluster and galaxy scale. The software developed for this paper is part of the public lenstool package which can be found at www.oamp.fr/cosmology/lenstool.