Turbocharging constraints on dark matter substructure through a synthesis of strong lensing flux ratios and extended lensed arcs

Abstract

Strong gravitational lensing provides a purely gravitational means to infer properties of dark matter halos and thereby constrain the particle nature of dark matter. Strong lenses sometimes appear as four lensed images of a background quasar accompanied by spatially-resolved emission from the quasar host galaxy encircling the main deflector (lensed arcs). We present methodology to simultaneously reconstruct lensed arcs and relative image magnifications (flux ratios) in the presence of full populations of subhalos and line-of-sight halos. To this end, we develop a new approach for multi-plane ray tracing that accelerates lens mass and source light reconstruction by factors of ∼100 − 1000. Using simulated data, we show that simultaneous reconstruction of lensed arcs and flux ratios isolates small-scale perturbations to flux ratios by dark matter substructure from uncertainties associated with the main deflector mass profile on larger angular scales. Relative to analyses that use only image positions and flux ratios to constrain the lens model, incorporating arcs strengthens likelihood ratios penalizing warm dark matter (WDM) with a suppression scale mhm/M⊙ in the range [107 − 107.5], [107.5 − 108], [108 − 108.5], [108.5 − 109] by factors of 1.3, 2.5, 5.6, and 13.1, respectively, for a cold dark matter (CDM) ground truth. The 95% exclusion limit improves by 0.5 dex in log10mhm. The enhanced sensitivity to low-mass halos enabled by these methods pushes the observational frontier of substructure lensing to the threshold of galaxy formation, enabling stringent tests of any theory that alters the properties of dark matter halos.