Wavefronts, Caustic Sheets, and Caustic Surfing in Gravitational Lensing

Although some of the properties of the caustics in planetary microlensing have been known, our understanding of them is mostly from scattered information based on numerical approaches. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and analytic analysis of the properties of the planetary caustics, which are one of the two sets of caustics in planetary microlensing, those located away from the central star. Under the perturbative approximation, we derive analytic expressions for th...

We discuss image formation in gravitational lensing systems using wave optics. Applying the Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction formula to waves scattered by a gravitational potential of a lens object, we demonstrate how images of source objects are obtained directly from wave functions without using a lens equation for gravitational lensing.

We consider scattering of electromagnetic waves from a distant point source by the gravitational field of the sun, taking the field oblateness due to the quadrupole moment of the sun into account. Effects of the field oblateness can play an important role in the high resolution solar gravitational lens imaging in the sub-micrometer wavelength range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

When gravitational waves propagate near massive objects, their paths curve resulting in gravitational lensing, which is expected to be a promising new instrument in astrophysics. If the time delay between different paths is comparable with the wave period, lensing may induce beating patterns in the waveform, and it is very close to caustics that these effects are likely to be observable. Near the caustic, however, the short-wave asymptotics associated with the geometrical opt...

The primary optical caustic surface behind a Kerr black hole is a four-cusped tube displaced from the line of sight. We derive the caustic surface in the nearly asymptotic region far from the black hole through a Taylor expansion of the lightlike geodesics up to and including fourth-order terms in m/b and a/b, where $m$ is the black hole mass, a the spin and b the impact parameter. The corresponding critical locus in the observer's sky is elliptical and a point-like source in...

We investigate the finite source size effect in the context of the wave optics in the gravitational lensing. The magnification of an extended source is presented in an analytic manner for the singular isothermal sphere lens model as well as the point mass lens model with the use of the thin lens approximation. The condition that the finite source size effect becomes substantial is demonstrated. As an application, we discuss possible observational consequences of the finite so...

We study the local behavior of gravitational lensing near fold catastrophes. Using a generic form for the lensing map near a fold, we determine the observable properties of the lensed images, focusing on the case when the individual images are unresolved, i.e., microlensing. Allowing for images not associated with the fold, we derive analytic expressions for the photometric and astrometric behavior near a generic fold caustic. We show how this form reduces to the more familia...

In this work we introduced a new proposal to study the gravitational lensing theory by spherical lenses, starting from its surface mass density $\Sigma(x)$ written in terms of a decreasing function $f$ of a dimensionless coordinate $x$ on the lens plane. The main result is the use of the function $f(x)$ to find directly the lens properties, at the same time that the lens problem is described by a first order differential equation which encodes all information about the lens. ...

Gravitational wave (GW) astronomy offers the potential to probe the wave-optics regime of gravitational lensing. Wave optics (WO) effects are relevant at low frequencies, when the wavelength is comparable to the characteristic lensing time delay multiplied by the speed of light, and are thus often negligible for electromagnetic signals. Accurate predictions require computing the conditionally convergent diffraction integral, which involves highly oscillatory integrands and is...

Gravitational lensing has developed into one of the most powerful tools for the analysis of the dark universe. This review summarises the theory of gravitational lensing, its main current applications and representative results achieved so far. It has two parts. In the first, starting from the equation of geodesic deviation, the equations of thin and extended gravitational lensing are derived. In the second, gravitational lensing by stars and planets, galaxies, galaxy cluster...