Kavli Affiliate: Risa H. Wechsler
| First 5 Authors: Bryce Wedig, Tansu Daylan, Simon Birrer, Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, Cora Dvorkin
| Summary:
Galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lenses can constrain dark matter models
and the Lambda Cold Dark Matter cosmological paradigm at sub-galactic scales.
Currently, there is a dearth of images of these rare systems with high
signal-to-noise and angular resolution. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
(hereafter, Roman), scheduled for launch in late 2026, will play a
transformative role in strong lensing science with its planned wide-field
surveys. With its remarkable 0.281 square degree field of view and
diffraction-limited angular resolution of ~0.1 arcsec, Roman is uniquely suited
to characterizing dark matter substructure from a robust population of strong
lenses. We present a yield simulation of detectable strong lenses in Roman’s
planned High Latitude Wide Area Survey (HLWAS). We simulate a population of
galaxy-galaxy strong lenses across cosmic time with Cold Dark Matter subhalo
populations, select those detectable in the HLWAS, and generate simulated
images accounting for realistic Wide Field Instrument detector effects. For a
fiducial case of single 146-second exposures, we predict around 160,000
detectable strong lenses in the HLWAS, of which about 500 will have sufficient
signal-to-noise to be amenable to detailed substructure characterization. We
investigate the effect of the variation of the point-spread function across
Roman’s field of view on detecting individual subhalos and the suppression of
the subhalo mass function at low masses. Our simulation products are available
to support strong lens science with Roman, such as training neural networks and
validating dark matter substructure analysis pipelines.
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