Gravitational lensing by the truncated isothermal sphere model for cosmological halos. I. Individual lens properties

Abstract

The gravitational lensing properties of cosmological halos depend upon the mass distribution within each halo. The description of halos as nonsingular, truncated isothermal spheres, a particular solution of the isothermal Lane- Emden equation (suitably modified for Lambda non equal 0), has proved to be a useful approximation for the halos which form from realistic initial conditions in a CDM universe. We derive here the basic lensing properties of such halos, including the image separation, magnification, shear, and time-delay. We also provide analytical expressions for the critical curves and caustics. We show how the scale-free results we derive yield scale-dependent lensing properties which depend upon the cosmological background universe and the mass and collapse redshift of the lensing halos, according to the truncated isothermal sphere (TIS) model of CDM halos derived elsewhere. We briefly describe the application of these results to the currently-favored Lambda-CDM universe.