Gordon T Richards

Strong gravitational lensing of quasars is a powerful tool to learn about the distribution of dark matter in lensing galaxies. Multiply imaged quasar systems have symmetries which allow for an understanding of the lensing galaxy without detailed mass reconstructions. Keeton et al. (2005) defined a useful expression for the flux anomaly of "fold'' lenses, which we might naively expect to have the same flux: Rfold=(fA-fB)/(fA+fB), where "A'' and "B'' represent the positive and negative parity images straddling a critical curve. We show that the geometric configuration of the images greatly constrains the possible flux anomalies allowable from a smooth galaxy potential. Using gravlens, we create a number of simple galaxies from various mass models to put our solution to the test, and find that simulated flux anomalies are reproduced to an accuracy of |δ R| < 0.04. We then apply our approach to a radio sample of 9 well-studied fold lenses and quickly identify those with significant substructure.