An Evaluation of 10 Lensing Models of the Frontier Fields Cluster
  MACSJ0416.1-2403
  Galaxy clusters can act as gravitational lenses to magnify the universe
behind them, allowing us to see deep into the early universe. The Hubble Space
Telescope Frontier Fields program (Lotz et al. 2017) uses six galaxy clusters
imaged by Hubble to discover and study galaxies at z ~ 5-10. Seven independent
teams developed lens models and derived magnifications for each galaxy cluster,
based on positional and redshift constraints from the best available data at
the time. In this work we evaluate ten models for MACSJ0416.1-2403, which were
made public in 2015, by contrasting them with new spectroscopic redshifts that
were measured in 2016 (Caminha et al. 2017). We developed an independent
comparison method that uses the source plane root-mean-square as a metric of
lensing model performance. Our analysis quantifies the ability of models to
predict unknown multiple images. We examine the source plane scatter of
multiply-imaged systems and explore dependence of the scatter on the location
and the redshift of the background sources. The analysis we present evaluates
the performance of the different algorithms in the specific case of the
MACSJ0416.1-2403 models.
