Inferring the concentration of dark matter subhalos perturbing strongly lensed images

TL;DR

This paper shows how dark matter subhalo concentrations affect gravitational lensing perturbations, enabling constraints on their properties and testing dark matter models with high-resolution observations.

Contribution

It introduces methods to infer subhalo concentration from lensing data, improving constraints on dark matter substructure at low masses.

Findings

High-resolution imaging can constrain subhalo concentration for masses >10^10 M_sun.

Detection of lower mass subhalos depends on their concentration and observational resolution.

Biases in mass inference can be mitigated by modeling both mass and concentration.

Abstract

We demonstrate that the perturbations of strongly lensed images by low-mass dark matter subhalos are significantly impacted by the concentration of the perturbing subhalo. For subhalo concentrations expected in $\Lambda$CDM, significant constraints on the concentration can be obtained at HST resolution for subhalos with masses larger than about $10^{10}M_\odot$. Constraints are also possible for lower mass subhalos, if their concentrations are higher than the expected scatter in CDM. We also find that the concentration of lower mass perturbers down to $\sim 10^8M_\odot$ can be well-constrained with a resolution of $\sim 0.01''$, which is achievable with long-baseline interferometry. Subhalo concentration also plays a critical role in the detectability of a perturbation, such that only high concentration perturbers with mass $\lesssim 10^9M_\odot$ are likely to be detected at HST resolution. If scatter in the $\Lambda$CDM mass-concentration relation is not accounted for during lens modeling, the inferred subhalo mass can be biased by up to a factor of 3(6) for subhalos of mass $10^9 M_\odot$($10^{10} M_\odot$); this bias can be eliminated if one varies both mass and concentration during lens fitting. Alternatively, one may robustly infer the projected mass within the subhalo's perturbation radius, defined by its distance to the critical curve of the lens being perturbed. With a sufficient number of detections, these strategies will make it possible to constrain the halo mass-concentration relation at low masses in addition to the mass function, offering a probe of dark matter physics as well as the small-scale primordial power spectrum.