General Multipoles and Their Implications for Dark Matter Inference

Understand

The flux ratios of strongly lensed quasars have previously been used to infer the properties of dark matter.

• In these analyses it is crucial to separate the effect of the main lensing galaxy and the low-mass dark matter halo population.
• In this work, we investigate flux-ratio perturbations resulting from general third- and fourth-order multipole perturbations to the main lensing galaxy's mass profile.
• We simulate four lens systems, each with a different lensing configuration, without multipoles.