MARS: A New Maximum-entropy-regularized Strong Lensing Mass Reconstruction Method

Free-form strong-lensing (SL) mass reconstructions typically suffer from overfitting, which manifests itself as false-positive small-scale fluctuations. We present a new free-form MAximum-entropy ReconStruction ( MARS ) method without the assumption that light traces mass (LTM). The MARS algorithm enables us to achieve excellent convergence in source positions (∼0.″001), minimize spurious small-scale fluctuations, and provide a quasi-unique solution independently of initial conditions. Our method is tested with the publicly available synthetic SL data FF-SIMS . The comparison with the truth shows that the mass reconstruction quality is on par with those of the best-performing LTM methods published in the literature, which have been demonstrated to outperform existing free-form methods. In terms of the radial mass profile reconstruction, we achieve