Program: GS-2021B-Q-237

Title:A Galaxy Redshift Survey of the Line-of-Sight Environments of Four Lensed Quasar Quads
PI:Elizabeth Buckley-Geer
Co-I(s): Huan Lin, Veronica Motta, Timo Anguita, Anowar Shajib, Joshua Frieman, Adriano Agnello, Simon Birrer, Dominique Sluse, Jason Poh, Chris Fassnacht

Abstract

Quadruply imaged quasars (hereafter quads) are a particularly powerful manifestation of strong lensing for the study of the dark universe. The time delays between multiple images provide a direct measurement of cosmic distances, and thus of the Hubble Constant and other cosmological parameters. Recent results from the TDCOSMO collaboration based on the blind analysis of seven systems presented limits on the Hubble constant H_0 that are competitive and complementary with established methods such as Cepheids, Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations and Supernovae Ia. One of the key components is characterization of the mass distribution along the line of sight. Our goal will be to use GMOS-N and GMOS-S to target about half the i < 23 galaxies within a 3-arcmin radius around four quad systems being analyzed by TDCOSMO. Such a redshift survey will let us identify galaxies or galaxy groups that need to be explicitly included in the lensing model, as well as help us determine the mass density along the line of sight to a few percent precision, ingredients needed to enable high-precision H_0 constraints for our target quad systems.