Inferring subhalo effective density slopes from strong lensing observations with neural likelihood-ratio estimation

Abstract

Strong gravitational lensing has emerged as a promising approach for probing dark matter models on sub-galactic scales. Recent work has proposed the subhalo effective density slope as a more reliable observable than the commonly used subhalo mass function. The subhalo effective density slope is a measurement independent of assumptions about the underlying density profile and can be inferred for individual subhalos through traditional sampling methods. To go beyond individual subhalo measurements, we leverage recent advances in machine learning and introduce a neural likelihood-ratio estimator to infer an effective density slope for populations of subhalos. We demonstrate that our method is capable of harnessing the statistical power of multiple subhalos (within and across multiple images) to distinguish between characteristics of different subhalo populations. The computational efficiency warranted by the neural likelihood-ratio estimator over traditional sampling enables statistical studies of dark matter perturbers and is particularly useful as we expect an influx of strong lensing systems from upcoming surveys.

arXiv comment11 pages, 5 figures; matches the published version with a corrected plot, conclusions unchanged

References in corpus (78)

• A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering
• Observational evidence for self-interacting cold dark matter
• The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) -- Overview
• Planck 2018 results. I. Overview and the cosmological legacy of Planck
• Small-Scale Challenges to the $\Lambda$CDM Paradigm
• Halo Formation in Warm Dark Matter Models
• Cold dark matter haloes in the Planck era: evolution of structural parameters for Einasto and NFW profiles
• Cosmological Simulations with Self-Interacting Dark Matter I: Constant Density Cores and Substructure
• The COSMOS Survey: Hubble Space Telescope / Advanced Camera for Surveys (HST/ACS) Observations and Data Processing
• Direct Detection of CDM Substructure
• Subhaloes in Self-Interacting Galactic Dark Matter Haloes
• Evidence for substructure in lens galaxies?
• The properties of warm dark matter haloes
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. V. The Full ACS Strong-Lens Sample
• The haloes of bright satellite galaxies in a warm dark matter universe
• Gravitational detection of a low-mass dark satellite at cosmological distance
• Compound gravitational lensing as a probe of dark matter substructure within galaxy halos
• The population of galaxy-galaxy strong lenses in forthcoming optical imaging surveys
• Detection of lensing substructure using ALMA observations of the dusty galaxy SDP.81
• Lenstronomy: multi-purpose gravitational lens modelling software package
• Detection of a Dark Substructure through Gravitational Imaging
• Shear and Ellipticity in Gravitational Lenses
• Warm dark matter chills out: constraints on the halo mass function and the free-streaming length of dark matter with 8 quadruple-image strong gravitational lenses
• FIRE in the Field: Simulating the Threshold of Galaxy Formation
• There is No Missing Satellites Problem
• Parameterized Machine Learning for High-Energy Physics
• Fast likelihood-free cosmology with neural density estimators and active learning
• The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs: a critical test of $\Lambda$CDM at the edge of galaxy formation
• Inference of the Cold Dark Matter substructure mass function at z=0.2 using strong gravitational lenses
• The BOSS Emission-Line Lens Survey (BELLS). I. A large spectroscopically selected sample of Lens Galaxies at redshift ~ 0.5
• Gravitational probes of dark matter physics
• Massive optimal data compression and density estimation for scalable, likelihood-free inference in cosmology
• Gravitational lens modeling with basis sets
• The Third Gravitational Lensing Accuracy Testing (GREAT3) Challenge Handbook
• The Strong Gravitational Lens Finding Challenge
• Fast calculation of a family of elliptical mass gravitational lens models
• Detection of substructure with adaptive optics integral field spectroscopy of the gravitational lens B1422+231
• Uncertainties in Parameters Estimated with Neural Networks: Application to Strong Gravitational Lensing
• A Quantitative Study of Interacting Dark Matter in Halos
• Structure and Subhalo Population of Halos in a Self-Interacting Dark Matter Cosmology
• Detecting dark matter substructure spectroscopically in strong gravitational lenses
• Novel constraints on the particle nature of dark matter from stellar streams
• Low-mass halo perturbations in strong gravitational lenses at redshift z$\sim$0.5 are consistent with CDM
• Lensing substructure quantification in RXJ1131-1231: A 2 keV lower bound on dark matter thermal relic mass
• Hints on the Nature of Dark Matter from the Properties of Milky Way Satellites
• Probing dark matter substructure in the gravitational lens HE0435-1223 with the WFC3 grism
• Measuring the power spectrum of dark matter substructure using strong gravitational lensing
• Discovering New Strong Gravitational Lenses in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• Precision simulation of ground-based lensing data using observations from space
• Strong lensing signatures of self-interacting dark matter in low-mass halos
• Diversity in density profiles of self-interacting dark matter satellite halos
• Halometry from Astrometry
• Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring subhalo population properties from strong lenses with machine learning
• Substructure in the lens HE 0435-1223
• Probing the nature of dark matter by forward modeling flux ratios in strong gravitational lenses
• Detecting Dark Matter Substructures around the Milky Way with Gaia
• High-resolution spectroscopy of the GD-1 stellar stream localizes the perturber near the orbital plane of Sagittarius
• Fast and Credible Likelihood-Free Cosmology with Truncated Marginal Neural Ratio Estimation
• Detection of Substructure in the Gravitationally Lensed Quasar MG0414+0534 using Mid-Infrared and Radio VLBI Observations
• Translation and Rotation Equivariant Normalizing Flow (TRENF) for Optimal Cosmological Analysis
• Hierarchical Inference With Bayesian Neural Networks: An Application to Strong Gravitational Lensing
• On the Power Spectrum of Dark Matter Substructure in Strong Gravitational Lenses
• Gravitational Lensing and the Power Spectrum of Dark Matter Substructure: Insights from the ETHOS N-body Simulations
• A Dark Census: Statistically Detecting the Satellite Populations of Distant Galaxies
• Cosmic Shear: Inference from Forward Models
• First Results on Dark Matter Substructure from Astrometric Weak Lensing
• Stellar Wakes from Dark Matter Subhalos
• Probing the small-scale structure in strongly lensed systems via transdimensional inference
• Beyond subhalos: Probing the collective effect of the Universe's small-scale structure with gravitational lensing
• A robust mass estimator for dark matter subhalo perturbations in strong gravitational lenses
• Quantifying the Line-of-Sight Halo Contribution to the Dark Matter Convergence Power Spectrum from Strong Gravitational Lenses
• Modeling GD-1 Gaps in a Milky-Way Potential
• Inferring the concentration of dark matter subhalos perturbing strongly lensed images
• Extracting the Subhalo Mass Function from Strong Lens Images with Image Segmentation
• Image segmentation for analyzing galaxy-galaxy strong lensing systems
• Towards constraining warm dark matter with stellar streams through neural simulation-based inference
• The Power of Halometry
• Quantifying the power spectrum of small-scale structure in semi-analytic galaxies

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The two-mode puzzle: Confronting self-interacting neutrinos with the full shape of the galaxy power spectrum
• Strong Lensing by Galaxies
• One never walks alone: the effect of the perturber population on subhalo measurements in strong gravitational lenses
• Subhalo effective density slope measurements from HST strong lensing data with neural likelihood-ratio estimation
• Anisotropic strong lensing as a probe of dark matter self-interactions
• Investigation of mass substructure in gravitational lens system SDP.81 with ALMA long-baseline observations
• Robustness of Neural Ratio and Posterior Estimators to Distributional Shifts for Population-Level Dark Matter Analysis in Strong Gravitational Lensing