Time Delay Challenge

The PyCS team, formed by members of the COSMOGRAIL collaboration (Vivien Bonvin, Malte Tewes & Frédéric Courbin) took part in the Strong Lens Time Delay Challenge 1 (TDC1), whose aim is to  assess the present capabilities of the community to accurately measure the time delays, and to provide input to dedicated monitoring campaigns and future LSST cosmology feasibility studies (Dobler et al., Liao et al.).

 

On July 1, 2014, the TDC1 challenge came to a close. The unblinding of the true time delays allowed us to test the performance of the time-delay measurement techniques currently used in COSMOGRAIL. Showing that these techniques present no significant biases and yield adequate uncertainty estimates, we can provide estimates for the number and precision of time-delay measurements that can be expected from future time-delay monitoring campaigns. Bonvin et al. presents these results.

 

The PyCS main submissions, presented in the TDC1 paper and detailed in Bonvin et al. are publicly available here : PyCS_TDC_submissions.tar.gz (178 KB).