Strong-Lensing Time Delay: A New Way of Measuring Cosmic Shear

The phenomenon of cosmic shear, or distortion of images of distant sources unaccompanied by magnification, is an effective way of probing the content and state of the foreground universe, because light rays do not have to pass through matter clumps in order to be sheared. It is shown that the delay in the arrival times between two simultaneously emitted photons that appear to be arriving from a pair of images of a strongly lensed cosmological source contains not only information about the Hubble constant, but also the long-range gravitational effect of galactic-scale mass clumps located away from the light paths in question. This is therefore also a method of detecting shear. Data on time delays among a sample of strongly lensed sources can provide crucial information about whether extra dynamics beyond gravity and dark energy are responsible for the global flatness of space. If the standard ΛCDM model is correct, there should be a large dispersion in the value of H0 as inferred from the delay data by (the usual procedure of) ignoring the shear from all other mass clumps except the strong lens itself. The fact that there has not been any report of a significant deviation from the h = 0.7 mark during any of the H0 determinations by this technique may already be pointing to the absence of the random effect discussed here.