Interferometric visibility of single-lens models: The thin-arcs approximation

Abstract

Long baseline interferometry of microlensing events can resolve the individual images of the source produced by the lens, which combined with the modelling of the microlensing light curve, leads to the exact lens mass and distance. Interferometric observations thus offer a unique opportunity to constrain the mass of exoplanets detected by microlensing, and to precisely measure the mass of distant isolated objects such as stars and brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and stellar black holes. Having accurate models and reliable numerical methods is of particular importance as the number of targets is expected to increase significantly in the near future. In this work we discuss the different approaches to calculating the fringe complex visibility for the important case of a single lens. We propose a robust integration scheme to calculate the exact visibility, and introduce a novel approximation, which we call the ‘thin-arcs approximation’, which can be applied over a wide range of lens-source separations. We find that this approximation runs six to ten times faster than the exact calculation, depending of the characteristics of the event and the required accuracy. This approximation provides accurate results for microlensing events of medium to high magnification observed around the peak (i.e. a large fraction of potential observational targets).