Phil Marshall edited Time Delay Distribution.tex  over 10 years ago

Commit id: 92e92e68fd3e4f2d7ca3dece3be48214ea15de8b

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For a given lens system, the time delays between images can be as short as $\sim$a day for close pairs of images to as long as $\sim$100s of days for images on opposite sides of the lensing galaxy. The magnitude of these time delays (as well as the other observables) depends on the redshifts of both the lens galaxy $z_l$ and the source redshift $z_s$, and therefore it is important to understand the expected distribution of those parameters in the LSST sample. \citet[][hereafter OM10]{OM10} generated a mock catalog of LSST lensed AGN based on plausible models for the source quasars and lens galaxies, and simple assumptions for the detectability of lensed quasars (including published 10$-\sigma$ limiting magnitude estimates, and the assumption that lenses will be detected if the third (second) brightest image for a given quad (double) is above this limit). This catalog provides a distribution of time delays that will be present in the LSST data which we can use to guide generation of mock light curves.   Figure \ref{fig:tdel_hist} \ref{fig:OM10dt}  shows the $\log_{10} \Delta t$ distributions for the OM10 double and quad sample. The distributions are roughly log-normal with means $\sim$10s of days and tails extending below 1 day for the quads, and above 100 days for the doubles. Lenses in both of these tails will have time delays that are difficult to measure, either because the cadence isn't high enough, or because the observing seasons are not long enough. We expect some fraction of time delay measurements to fail catastrophically in this way, but we also expect the catastrophe rate, and the robustness with which failure is reported, to vary with measurement algorithm.