An Atlas of Predicted Exotic Gravitational Lenses
Gilles Orban de Xivry, Phil Marshall

TL;DR
This paper predicts various exotic gravitational lens configurations using physically-motivated models, highlighting their potential for detailed mass distribution studies and estimating their occurrence rates in wide-field surveys.
Contribution
It introduces a set of lens potential models to predict exotic image configurations and estimates their abundance in all-sky surveys.
Findings
Misaligned disks and bulges produce swallowtail and butterfly catastrophes.
Binary galaxies can create Y-shaped image configurations.
Hyperbolic umbilic configurations can have magnifications around 100.
Abstract
Wide-field optical imaging surveys will contain tens of thousands of new strong gravitational lenses. Some of these will have new and unusual image configurations, and so will enable new applications: for example, systems with high image multiplicity will allow more detailed study of galaxy and group mass distributions, while high magnification is needed to super-resolve the faintest objects in the high redshift universe. Inspired by a set of six unusual lens systems [including five selected from the Sloan Lens ACS (SLACS) and Strong Lensing Legacy (SL2S) surveys, plus the cluster Abell 1703], we consider several types of multi-component, physically-motivated lens potentials, and use the ray-tracing code "glamroc" to predict exotic image configurations. We also investigate the effects of galaxy source profile and size, and use realistic sources to predict observable magnifications and…
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