A New Measure for Weak Lensing Flexion

Abstract

We study a possibility to use the octopole moment of gravitationally lensed images as a direct measure of the third-order weak gravitational lensing effect, or the gravitational flexion. It turns out that there is a natural relation between flexion and certain combinations of octopole/higher-multipole moments which we call the Higher Order Lensing Image's Characteristics (HOLICs). This will allow one to measure directly flexion from observable octopole and higher-multipole moments of background images. We show based on simulated observations how the use of HOLICs can improve the accuracy and resolution of a reconstructed mass map, in which we assume Gaussian uncertainties in the shape measurements estimated using deep i'-band data of blank fields observed with Suprime-Cam on the Subaru telescope.