Predicting High-magnification Events in Microlensed Quasars in the Era of LSST Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Upcoming wide-field surveys, such as the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will monitor thousands of strongly lensed quasars over a 10 yr period. Many of these monitored quasars will undergo high-magnification events (HMEs) through microlensing, as the accretion disk crosses a caustic—places of infinite magnification. Microlensing allows us to map the inner regions of the accretion disk as it crosses a caustic, even at large cosmological distances. The observational cadences of LSST are not ideal for probing the inner regions of the accretion disk, so there is a need to predict HMEs as early as possible, to trigger high-cadence multiband or spectroscopic follow-up observations. Here, we simulate a diverse and realistic sample of 10 yr quasar microlensing light curves to train a recurrent neural network to predict HMEs before they occur, by classifying the locations of the peaks at each time step. This is the first deep-learning approach for predicting HMEs. We give estimates of how well we expect to predict HME peaks during LSST and benchmark how our metrics change with different cadence strategies. With LSST-like observations, we can predict approximately 55% of HME peaks, corresponding to tens to hundreds per year and a false-positive rate of around 20% compared to the total number of HMEs. Our network can be continuously applied throughout the LSST survey, providing crucial alerts for optimizing follow-up resources.