Strong Gravitational Lens Modeling

Dear Colleagues,

The upcoming decade will be a golden era for strong lensing: While recently started and further upcoming wide-field imaging surveys are expected to provide 10⁵ galaxy-scale lenses and thousands of cluster-scale lenses, and Rubin-LSST will revolutionize the transient science, impacting strong lensing significantly. Additionally, dedicated, deep, and high-resolution imaging and spectroscopic observations will increase the amount of astrophysical data of a single lensing system enormously. Obtaining specific strong-lens mass models will provide the community with completely new challenges that have to be overcome. For the first time, we will be able to analyze large samples (>10,000 lenses) from a single survey and study their properties at a population level. Rapid and fully autonomous modeling techniques, such as machine learning and semi-autonomous modeling codes, will become crucial to obtain mass model parameters in a uniform way for a large fraction of the new galaxy-scale lenses. On a cluster scale, it will become essential to streamline and explore the mass-modeling procedure. Furthermore, dedicated high-precision mass models for individual, peculiar, and rare lens systems will be crucial for their individual, detailed analysis and exploitation.

It is a pleasure for me to announce a Special Issue targeting the topic “Strong Gravitational Lens Modeling”. Contributions focusing on new modeling techniques, mass model comparison efforts, or individual mass models focusing on specific lenses for any specific study are welcome, without any restrictions on the exploited wavelength range nor mass scale.

Dr. Stefan Schuldt
Guest Editor

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