Speaker
Description
Recent studies uncovered several aspects of strong gravitational lenses that make them useful tools for cosmology. One example is the weak-lensing shear induced by structures along the strong lens’s line of sight (LOS). This observable carries information about the mass distribution in the Universe and therefore represents a valuable cosmological probe.
While the theoretical feasibility of this method has been demonstrated, the practical observability and achievable precision remain largely to be assessed.
In this work, I investigate this question using realistic simulated lenses. Instead of relying solely on analytical mass models, I developed a pipeline to extract lens galaxies from state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations and generate mock lensed images, which are then analysed using current lens-modelling techniques. This approach allows us to test the impact of realistic mass distributions and modelling assumptions on the recovery of the LOS shear signal.
I will present the first results of this modelling effort and discuss how they inform the development of more flexible lens models capable of capturing the complexity of simulated galaxies.