Pranav(Illinois Math and Science Academy)
Mentors: Brian Nord and Liz Buckley-Geer
We report results from an automated method to identify lensed quasars from the Dark Energy Survey using a PSF-difference-based algorithm aimed at identifying close-separation lens candidates. The PSF-difference algorithm utilizes the difference between PSF magnitude and model magnitude, as well as image segmentation, to deblend and identify close-separation candidates. In total, the algorithms identified 156 final lens candidates and also identified a number of known lensed quasars within the DES footprint, indicating that the method described in this paper is effective in identifying candidate lensed quasars. Efforts to obtain follow-up observations for confirmation of the final candidates are ongoing, and constraints on cosmological parameters will be discussed in future papers.