Extracting the Subhalo Mass Function from Strong Lens Images with Image Segmentation

Understand

Detecting substructure within strongly lensed images is a promising route to shed light on the nature of dark matter.

• However, it is a challenging task, which traditionally requires detailed lens modeling and source reconstruction, taking weeks to analyze each system.
• We use machine-learning to circumvent the need for lens and source modeling and develop a neural network to both locate subhalos in an image as well as determine their mass using the technique of image segmentation.
• The network is trained on images with a single subhalo located near the Einstein ring across a wide range of apparent source magnitudes.