Time delay induced by plasma in strong lens systems

TL;DR

This paper analytically investigates how surrounding plasma affects the time delay in strong gravitational lens systems, considering geometric, potential, and dispersion delays, and discusses implications for measuring the Hubble constant.

Contribution

It provides a compact analytical formulation of plasma-induced corrections to time delays in strong lensing, incorporating arbitrary spherically symmetric plasma distributions.

Findings

Plasma causes measurable corrections to time delays in lensing.

Analytical formulas for plasma effects are derived and simplified.

Potential impact on Hubble constant measurements is discussed.

Abstract

If the gravitational lens is surrounded by non-homoheneous plasma, in addition to the vacuum gravitational deflection, chromatic refraction occurs. Also, the speed of signal propagation decreases compared to vacuum. In this article, we investigate analytically the time delay in the case of gravitational lensing in plasma, focusing on strong lens systems. We take into account the following contributions: geometric delay due to trajectory bending in the presence of both gravity and plasma; potential delay of the ray in the gravitational field of the lens; dispersion delay in the plasma due to decrease of speed of light signal in the medium. We consider singular isothermal sphere as a model of gravitational lens, and arbitrary spherically symmetric distribution of surrounding plasma. For this scenario, plasma corrections for the time delay between two images are found in compact analytical form convenient for estimates. We discuss also the possible influence of the plasma on the value of the Hubble constant, determined from observations of the time delay in strong lens systems.