Towards the determination of lensing effects with realistic matter distributions
Abstract
Recently, Holz and Wald have presented a method for determining gravitational lensing effects in inhomogeneous universes. Their use of realistic galaxy models has been limited to the singular, truncated isothermal sphere with a fixed mass. In this paper, their method is generalized to allow for matter distributions more accurately describing the actual properties of galaxies, as derived from observations and N-body simulations. This includes the density profile proposed by Navarro, Frenk and White, as well as a distribution of galaxy masses. As an example of the possible applications of the method, we consider lensing effects on supernova luminosity distributions. We find that results for different mass distributions of smooth dark matter halos are very similar, making it difficult to distinguish between halo models using supernova data, but also making lensing effects predictable for a broad range of halo models. However, given large statistics, one should be able to discriminate these cases from that of a dominant component of dark matter in compact objects.Keywords
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