PICS: Simulations of Strong Gravitational Lensing in Galaxy Clusters

Gravitational lensing has become one of the most powerful tools available for investigating the 'dark side' of the universe. Cosmological strong gravitational lensing, in particular, probes the properties of the dense cores of dark matter halos over decades in mass and offers the opportunity to study the distant universe at flux levels and spatial resolutions otherwise unavailable. Studies of strongly-lensed variable sources offer yet further scientific opportunities. One of the challenges in realizing the potential of strong lensing is to understand the statistical context of both the individual systems that receive extensive follow-up study, as well as that of the larger samples of strong lenses that are now emerging from survey efforts. Motivated by these challenges, we have developed an image-simulation pipeline, PICS (Pipeline for Images of Cosmological Strong lensing) to generate realistic strong gravitational lensing signals from group and cluster scale lenses. PICS uses a low-noise and unbiased density estimator based on (resampled) Delaunay Tessellations to calculate the density field; lensed images are produced by ray-tracing images of actual galaxies from deep Hubble Space Telescope observations. Other galaxies, similarly sampled, are added to fill in the light cone. The pipeline further adds cluster-member galaxies and foreground stars into the lensed images. The entire image ensemble is then observed using a realistic point spread function which includes appropriate detector artifacts for bright stars. Noise is further added, including such non-Gaussian elements as noise window-paning from mosaiced observations, residual bad pixels, and cosmic rays. The aim is to produced simulated images that appear identical - to the eye (expert or otherwise) - to real observations in various imaging surveys.