Generalised model-independent characterisation of strong gravitational lenses

Abstract

We investigate the impact of higher-order gravitational lens properties and properties of the background source on our approach to directly infer local lens properties from observables in multiple images of strong gravitationally lensed extended, static background sources developed in Papers I–VI. As the degeneracy between local lens and source properties only allows one to determine relative local lens properties between the multiple image positions, we cannot distinguish common scalings and distortions caused by lensing from intrinsic source characteristics. The consequences of this degeneracy for lens modelling and our approach and ways to break it are detailed here. We also set up quantitative measures around the critical curve to find clear limits on the validity of the approximation that source properties are negligible to infer local lens properties at critical points. The impact of the source on the local lens properties depends on the reduced shear at the image position and the amplitude and orientation of the source ellipticity, as we derive in this paper. Similarly, we investigate the role of third-order lens properties (flexion), in two galaxy-cluster simulations and in the Lenstool-reconstruction of the galaxy-cluster lens CL0024. In all three cases, we find that flexion is negligible in over 90% of all pixels of the lensing region for our current imprecision of local lens properties of about 10%. Decreasing the imprecision to 2%, higher-order terms start to play a role, especially in regions with shear components close to zero.