astrophysics

A Fast Concentric-disk Contour Integration Method For Microlensing Limb-darkening Effect

arXiv:2607.12483

summary

The paper introduces a concentric-disk contour integration technique that reformulates the limb‑darkening integral for microlensing, allowing high‑order adaptive quadrature and achieving faster convergence than traditional concentric‑ring methods.

Abstract

Incorporating limb darkening is a computationally demanding step in contour-integration-based microlensing modeling. Conventional concentric-ring integration is incompatible with high-order quadrature schemes, limiting efficiency. We develop a new concentric-disk method, which reformulates the limb-darkening integral and enables the application of high-order adaptive quadrature, significantly accelerating the computation. While mainly demonstrated using a linear limb-darkening profile, the method readily extends to more general limb-darkening profiles. As a source effect, it applies to lens systems of any complexity. The method achieves a convergence rate scaling faster than with the number of uniform-source magnification evaluations , a significant improvement over the concentric-ring scaling. For a relative accuracy of , the concentric-disk approach typically requires only or less of the computational cost of traditional algorithms. This method has been implemented in the binary-lens contour integration code \texttt{Twinkle}, providing an efficient and precise tool for analyzing current and future high-precision microlensing observations.

Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. 16 pages, 4 figures

Topics & keywords

#microlensing#limb darkening#numerical integration#adaptive quadrature#contour integrationconcentric-disk methodhigh-order quadratureconvergence scalingTwinkle codebinary lens