In current microlensing planet searches that are being carried out in a survey/follow-up mode, the most important targets for follow-up observations are lensing events with high magnifications resulting from the very close approach of background source stars to the lens. In this paper, we investigate the dependence of the sensitivity to planets on detailed properties of high-magnification events. From this, it is found that the sensitivity does not monotonically increase as the impact parameter between the lens and the source trajectory decreases. Instead, it is roughly the same for events with impact parameters less than a certain threshold value. It is also found that events involving main-sequence source stars are sensitive to planets in a much wider range of separation and mass ratio, than those events involved with giant source stars. Based on these results, we propose observational strategies for maximal planet detections considering the types of telescopes available for follow-up observations.

Gaudi, Naber & Sackett pointed out that if an event is caused by a lens system containing more than two planets, all planets will affect the central region of the magnification pattern, and thus the existence of the multiple planets can be inferred by detecting additionally deformed anomalies from intensive monitoring of high magnification microlensing events. Unfortunately, this method has important limitations in identifying the existence of multiple planets and determining their parameters (the mass ratio and the instantaneous projected separation) due to the degeneracy of the resulting light curve anomalies from those induced by a single planet and the complexity of multiple planet lensing models. In this paper, we propose a new channel to search for multiple planets via microlensing. The method is based on the fact that the lensing light curve anomalies induced by multiple planets are well approximated by the superposition of those of the single planet systems where the individual planet-primary pairs act as independent lens systems. Then, if the source trajectory passes both of the outer deviation regions induced by the individual planets, one can unambiguously identify the existence of the multiple planets. We illustrate that the probability of successively detecting light curve anomalies induced by two Jovian-mass planets located in the lensing zone through this channel will be substantial. Since the individual anomalies can be well described by much simpler single planet lensing models, the proposed method has an important advantage of allowing one to accurately determine the parameters of the individual planets.

As an efficient method to detect blending of general gravitational microlensing events, it is proposed to measure the shift of source star image centroid caused by microlensing. The conventional method to detect blending by this method is measuring the difference between the positions of the source star image point spread function measured on the images taken before and during the event (the PSF centroid shift, δθc,PSF). In this paper, we investigate the difference between the centroid positions measured on the reference and the subtracted images obtained by using the difference image analysis method (DIA centroid shift, δθc.DIA), and evaluate its relative usefulness in detecting blending over the conventional method based on δθc,PSF measurements. From this investigation, we find that the DIA centroid shift of an event is always larger than the PSF centroid shift. We also find that while δθc,PSF becomes smaller as the event amplification decreases, δθc.DIA remains constant regardless of the amplification. In addition, while δθc,DIA linearly increases with the increasing value of the blended light fraction, δθc,PSF peaks at a certain value of the blended light fraction and then eventually decreases as the fraction further increases. Therefore, measurements of δθc,DIA instead of δθc,PSF will be an even more efficient method to detect the blending effect of especially of highly blended events, for which the uncertainties in the determined time scales are high, as well as of low amplification events, for which the current method is highly inefficient.