Neglecting Dynamical Microlensing Can Bias Accretion Disk Size Measurements at the Population Level

Abstract

Microlensing of strongly lensed quasars probes unresolved accretion disks, but many inference methods use static magnification maps with fixed relative microlens positions. Using the GPU-accelerated simulator Microcaustics, we generate ten-year multiband light curves for three quadruply lensed quasar configurations. We compare dynamical microlensing with independent microlens motions against coherent bulk motion, and a microlens mass distribution against equal masses, keeping the velocity distribution of individual microlenses and mean mass fixed. We infer population disk sizes using ridge regression on the means and lower and upper scatters of ten variability and event metrics. We measure biases by applying models trained with simplified physics to simulations including both effects. Models trained on coherent motion interpret the additional variability from evolving caustics as smaller disks. For populations of 128 independent realizations, jointly inferred radii are consistently smaller by 6-28%. Microlens dynamics increase caustic-crossing rates pooled across all four macroimages by 5-15% and r-band high-magnification-event (HME) rates by 13-25%, while shortening median HME durations by 4-12%. Omitting the mass distribution produces configuration-dependent disk-size offsets from -12% to +5%. Including the mass distribution decreases caustic-crossing rates by 6-8% and HME rates by 6-12%. It also narrows the spread of ten-year averaged microlensing time-delay differences between macroimages by a median of 9-12% per system, while microlens dynamics have a smaller, image-pair-dependent effect. These results demonstrate the importance of microlens dynamics for population disk-size inference and motivate simulations that include dynamical microlensing and a microlens mass distribution.