FFT based evaluation of microlensing magnification with extended source

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, accurate FFT-based method for evaluating microlensing magnification with extended sources, applicable to any source profile and suitable for large data sets.

Contribution

A novel FFT-based approach that computes extended source microlensing magnification without approximations, significantly reducing computation time.

Findings

Evaluation time is approximately 1 millisecond per calculation.

Accuracy of the method exceeds 99.7%.

Applicable to any source profile and suitable for large survey data.

Abstract

The extended source effect on microlensing magnification is non-negligible and must be taken into account for in an analysis of microlensing. However, the evaluation of the extended source magnification is numerically expensive because it includes the two-dimensional integral over source profile. Various studies have developed methods to reduce this integral down to the one-dimensional-integral or integral-free form, which adopt some approximations or depend on the exact form of the source profile, e.g. disk, linear/quadratic limb-darkening profile. In this paper, we develop a new method to evaluate the extended source magnification based on fast Fourier transformation (FFT), which does not adopt any approximations and is applicable to any source profiles. Our implementation of the FFT based method enables the fast evaluation of the extended source magnification as fast as $\sim1$ msec (CPU time on a laptop) and guarantees an accuracy better than 0.3%. The FFT based method can be used for the template fitting to a huge data set of light curves from the existing and upcoming surveys.