Probing dark matter substructures with free-form modelling: a case study of the ‘Jackpot’ strong lens

ABSTRACT Characterizing the population and internal structure of sub-galactic haloes is critical for constraining the nature of dark matter. These haloes can be detected near galaxies that act as strong gravitational lenses with extended arcs, as they perturb the shapes of the arcs. However, this method is subject to false-positive detections and systematic uncertainties, particularly degeneracies between an individual halo and larger scale asymmetries in the distribution of lens mass. We present a new free-form lens modelling code, developed within the framework of the open-source software pyautolens, to address these challenges. Our method models mass perturbations that cannot be captured by parametric models as pixelized potential corrections and suppresses unphysical solutions via a Matérn regularization scheme that is inspired by Gaussian process regression. This approach enables the recovery of diverse mass perturbations, including subhaloes, line-of-sight haloes, external shear, and multipole components that represent the complex angular mass distribution of the lens galaxy, such as boxiness/disciness. Additionally, our fully Bayesian framework objectively infers hyperparameters associated with the regularization of pixelized sources and potential corrections, eliminating the need for manual fine-tuning. By applying our code to the well-known ‘Jackpot’ lens system, SLACS0946+1006, we robustly detect a highly concentrated subhalo that challenges the standard cold dark matter model. This study represents the first attempt to independently reveal the mass distribution of a subhalo using a fully free-form approach.