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Abstract Constraining the distribution of small-scale structure in our universe allows us to probe alternatives to the cold dark matter paradigm. Strong gravitational lensing offers a unique window into small dark matter halos (<1010M⊙) because these halos impart a gravitational lensing signal even if they do not host luminous galaxies. We create large data sets of strong lensing images with realistic low-mass halos, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observational effects, and galaxy light from HST’s COSMOS field. Using a simulation-based inference pipeline, we train a neural posterior estimator of the subhalo mass function (SHMF) and place constraints on populations of lenses generated using a separate set of galaxy sources. We find that by combining our network with a hierarchical inference framework, we can both reliably infer the SHMF across a variety of configurations and scale efficiently to populations with hundreds of lenses. By conducting precise inference on large and complex simulated data sets, our method lays a foundation for extracting dark matter constraints from the next generation of wide-field optical imaging surveys.
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Domain Adaptation for Simulation-based Dark Matter Searches with Strong Gravitational Lensing
Abstract The identity of dark matter has remained surprisingly elusive. While terrestrial experiments may be able to nail down a model, an alternative method is to identify dark matter based on astrophysical or cosmological signatures. A particularly sensitive approach is based on the unique signature of dark matter substructure in galaxy–galaxy strong lensing images. Machine-learning applications have been explored for extracting this signal. Because of the limited availability of high-quality strong lensing images, these approaches have exclusively relied on simulations. Due to the differences with the real instrumental data, machine-learning models trained on simulations are expected to lose accuracy when applied to real data. Here domain adaptation can serve as a crucial bridge between simulations and real data applications. In this work, we demonstrate the power of domain adaptation techniques applied to strong gravitational lensing data with dark matter substructure. We show with simulated data sets representative of Euclid and Hubble Space Telescope observations that domain adaptation can significantly mitigate the losses in the model performance when applied to new domains. Lastly, we find similar results utilizing domain adaptation for the problem of lens finding by adapting models trained on a simulated data set to one composed of real lensed and unlensed galaxies from the Hyper Suprime-Cam. This technique can help domain experts build and apply better machine-learning models for extracting useful information from the strong gravitational lensing data expected from the upcoming surveys.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2108645
- PAR ID:
- 10443889
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.3847
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Volume:
- 954
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0004-637X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. 28
- Size(s):
- Article No. 28
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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