The study of dark matter substructure through strong gravitational lensing has shown enormous promise in probing the properties of dark matter on subgalactic scales. This approach has already been used to place strong constraints on a wide range of dark matter models including self-interacting dark matter, fuzzy dark matter and warm dark matter. One major uncertainty in these studies is the strength of tidal stripping experienced by subhalos. We study theoretical predictions for the statistical properties of subhalos in strong gravitational lenses using the semianalytic galaxy formation toolkit galacticus. We present a large suite of dark matter only galacticus models, spanning nearly 2 orders of magnitude in host halo mass (from Milky Way to group mass halos between redshifts from 0.2 to 0.8). Additionally, to address potential shortcomings of including only dark matter physics we include a smaller set of galacticus runs with the potential of a central massive elliptical to complement our dark matter only suite of models. We place particular focus on quantities relevant to strong gravitational lensing; namely the projected number density of substructure near the Einstein radius as a function of the host stellar mass and redshift. In the innermost region in projection, we find that our galacticus models agree with N-body simulations within a factor of $\sim 2$ within the Einstein radius. We find that the addition of a central galaxy suppresses the projected number density of subhalos within the Einstein radius by around 15% relative to dark matter only simulations.

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• Dark matter
• Galactic halos
• Astrophysical & cosmological simulations