Cross-correlations between the galaxy number density in a lensing source sample and that in an overlapping spectroscopic sample can in principle be used to calibrate the lensing source redshift distribution. In this paper, we study in detail to what extent this cross-correlation method can mitigate loss of cosmological information in upcoming weak lensing surveys (combined with a CMB prior) due to lack of knowledge of the source distribution. We consider a scenario where photometric redshifts are available, and find that, unless the photometric redshift distribution p(z_{ph}|z) is calibrated very accurately a priori (bias and scatter known to ~0.002 for, e.g., EUCLID), the additional constraint on p(z_{ph}|z) from the cross correlation technique to a large extent restores the cosmological information originally lost due to the uncertainty in dn/dz(z). Considering only the gain in photo-z accuracy and not the additional cosmological information, enhancements of the dark energy figure of merit of up to a factor of 4 (40) can be achieved for a SuMIRe (Subaru Measurement of Images and Redshifts, the combination of the Hyper Suprime Cam lensing survey and the Prime Focus Spectrograph redshift survey)-like (EUCLID-like) combination of lensing and redshift surveys. However, the success of the method is strongly sensitive to our knowledge of the galaxy bias evolution in the source sample. If this bias is modeled by a free parameter in each of a large number of redshift bins, we find that a prior of order 0.01 is needed on b_i \sqrt{Δz} in each redshift slice (where Δz is the bin width and b_i the value of the galaxy bias in the i-th source bin) to optimize the gains from the cross-correlation method (i.e. to approach the cosmology constraints attainable if the bias were known exactly).[abridged]
We investigated a cosmological model that allows a momentum transfer between dark matter and dark energy. The interaction in the dark sector mainly affects the behaviour of perturbations on small scales while the background evolution matches the $w$CDM solution. As a result of the momentum transfer, these kinds of models help alleviating the $σ_8$ discrepancy in the standard model, but do not resolve the so-called $H_0$ tension. We confirm that this is indeed the case by computing cosmological constraints. While our analysis tends to favour $σ_8$ values lower than in $Λ$CDM, we do not find evi…
The scaling between X-ray observables and mass for galaxy clusters and groups is instrumental for cluster based cosmology and an important probe for the thermodynamics of the intracluster gas. We calibrate a scaling relation between the weak lensing mass and X-ray spectroscopic temperature for 10 galaxy groups in the COSMOS field, combined with 55 higher mass clusters from the literature. The COSMOS data includes HST imaging and redshift measurements of 46 source galaxies per square arcmin, enabling us to perform unique weak lensing measurements of low mass systems. Our sample extends the mass…
Mass measurements of astronomical objects are most wanted but still elusive. We need them to trace the formation and evolution of cosmic structure but we can get direct measurements only for a minority. This lack can be circumvented with a proxy and a scaling relation. The twofold goal of estimating the unbiased relation and finding the right proxy value to plug in can be hampered by systematics, selection effects, Eddington/Malmquist biases and time evolution. We present a Bayesian hierarchical method which deals with these issues. Masses to be predicted are treated as missing data in the reg…
Yes! Upcoming galaxy shear surveys have the potential to significantly improve our understanding of dark energy and neutrino mass if lensing systematics can be sufficiently controlled. The cross-correlations between the weak lensing shear, galaxy number counts from a galaxy redshift survey, and the CMB lensing convergence can be used to calibrate the shear multiplicative bias, one of the most challenging systematics in lensing surveys. These cross-correlations can significantly reduce the deleterious effects of the uncertainties in multiplicative bias.
The power spectrum of reconstructed cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing maps is a powerful tool for constraints on cosmological parameters like the sum of the neutrino masses and the dark energy equation of state. One possible complication is the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, due to the scattering of CMB photons by moving electrons, which can bias the reconstruction of the CMB lensing power spectrum through both kSZ-lensing correlations and the non-Gaussianity of the kSZ temperature anisotropies. We investigate for the first time the bias to CMB lensing reconstruction from t…
We simultaneously present constraints on the stellar-to-halo mass relation for central and satellite galaxies through a weak lensing analysis of spectroscopically classified galaxies. Using overlapping data from the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), and the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey (GAMA), we find that satellite galaxies are hosted by halo masses that are $0.53 \pm 0.39$ dex (68\% confidence, $3σ$ detection) smaller than those of central galaxies of the same stellar mass (for a stellar mass of $\log(M_{\star}/M_{\odot}) = 10.6$). This is consistent with galaxy format…
A key challenge for current and upcoming CMB lensing measurements is their sensitivity to biases from extragalactic foregrounds, such as Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signals or cosmic infrared background emission. Several methods have been developed to mitigate these lensing foreground biases, dividing broadly into multi-frequency cleaning approaches and modifications to the estimator geometry, but how to optimally combine these methods has not yet been explored in detail. In this paper, we examine which combination of lensing foreground mitigation strategies is best able to reduce the impact of for…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is a powerful technique to probe the dark components of the universe. To understand the measurement process of weak lensing and the associated systematic effects, image simulations are becoming increasingly important. For this purpose we present a first implementation of the $\textit{Monte Carlo Control Loops}$ ($\textit{MCCL}$; Refregier & Amara 2014), a coherent framework for studying systematic effects in weak lensing. It allows us to model and calibrate the shear measurement process using image simulations from the Ultra Fast Image Generator (UFig; Ber…
We investigate whether a Gaussian likelihood is sufficient to obtain accurate parameter constraints from a Euclid-like combined tomographic power spectrum analysis of weak lensing, galaxy clustering and their cross-correlation. Testing its performance on the full sky against the Wishart distribution, which is the exact likelihood under the assumption of Gaussian fields, we find that the Gaussian likelihood returns accurate parameter constraints. This accuracy is robust to the choices made in the likelihood analysis, including the choice of fiducial cosmology, the range of scales included, and …
We present weak lensing and X-ray analysis of 12 low mass clusters from the CFHTLenS and XMM-CFHTLS surveys. We combine these systems with high-mass systems from CCCP and low-mass systems from COSMOS to obtain a sample of 70 systems, spanning over two orders of magnitude in mass. We measure core-excised Lx-Tx, M-Lx and M-Tx scaling relations and include corrections for observational biases. By providing fully bias corrected relations, we give the current limitations for Lx and Tx as cluster mass proxies. We demonstrate that Tx benefits from a significantly lower intrinsic scatter at fixed mass…
We study the impact of the often neglected lensing contribution to galaxy number counts on the $E_g$ statistics which is used to constrain deviations from GR. This contribution affects both the galaxy-galaxy and the convergence-galaxy spectra, while it is larger for the latter. At higher redshifts probed by upcoming surveys, neglecting this term induces a substantial error in the spectra and therefore on the $E_g$ statistics which is constructed from the combination of the two. Moreover, including it, renders the $E_g$ statistics scale and bias-dependent and hence puts into question its very o…
Context. Accurate model predictions including the physics of baryons are required to make the most of the upcoming large cosmological surveys devoted to gravitational lensing. The advent of hydrodynamical cosmological simulations enables such predictions on sufficiently sizeable volumes. Aims. Lensing quantities (deflection, shear, convergence) and their statistics (convergence power spectrum, shear correlation functions, galaxy-galaxy lensing) are computed in the past lightcone built in the Horizon-AGN hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, which implements our best knowledge on baryonic phy…
A phenomenological extension of the well-known brane-world cosmology of Dvali, Gabadadze and Porrati (eDGP) has recently been proposed. In this model, a cosmological-constant-like term is explicitly present as a non-vanishing tension sigma on the brane, and an extra parameter alpha tunes the cross-over scale r_c, the scale at which higher dimensional gravity effects become non negligible. Since the Hubble parameter in this cosmology reproduces the same LCDM expansion history, we study how upcoming weak lensing surveys, such as Euclid and DES (Dark Energy Survey), can confirm or rule out this c…
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is expected to be amongst the most powerful cosmological tools for ongoing and upcoming CMB experiments. In this work, we investigate a bias to CMB lensing reconstruction from temperature anisotropies due to the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, that is, the Doppler shift of CMB photons induced by Compton-scattering off moving electrons. The kSZ signal yields biases due to both its own intrinsic non-Gaussianity and its non-zero cross-correlation with the CMB lensing field (and other fields that trace the large-scale struct…
Steeling Weak Lensing Source Galaxy Samples against Systematics using Wide Field Spectroscopy
Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）；Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, Department of Physics, UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校物理系宇宙学物理中心）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Department of Physics, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学物理系）
Weak lensing causes spatially coherent fluctuations in flux of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). This lensing magnification allows for weak lensing measurement independent of cosmic shear. It is free of shape measurement errors associated with cosmic shear and can therefore be used to diagnose and calibrate multiplicative error. Although this lensing magnification is difficult to measure accurately in auto correlation, its cross correlation with cosmic shear and galaxy distribution in overlapping area can be measured to significantly higher accuracy. Therefore these cross correlations can put usefu…
Future high-resolution measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will produce catalogs of tens of thousands of galaxy clusters through the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect. We forecast how well different configurations of a CMB Stage-4 experiment can constrain cosmological parameters, in particular the amplitude of structure as a function of redshift $σ_8(z)$, the sum of neutrino masses $Σm_ν$, and the dark energy equation of state $w(z)$. A key element of this effort is calibrating the tSZ scaling relation by measuring the lensing signal around clusters. We examine how the …
Tests of gravity on large-scales in the universe can be made using both imaging and spectroscopic surveys. The former allow for measurements of weak lensing, galaxy clustering and cross-correlations such as the ISW effect. The latter probe galaxy dynamics through redshift space distortions. We use a set of basic observables, namely lensing power spectra, galaxy-lensing and galaxy-velocity cross-spectra in multiple redshift bins (including their covariances), to estimate the ability of upcoming surveys to test gravity theories. We use a two-parameter description of gravity that allows for the P…
Detecting gravitational lensing by matter currents
Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学）；CEA（法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；AIM（天体物理学、物质与相互作用研究所）；Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Sussex（苏塞克斯大学物理与天文系）
The halo-galaxy lensing correlation function or the average tangential shear profile over sampled halos is a very powerful means of measuring the halo masses, the mass profile, and the halo-mass correlation function of very large separations in the linear regime. We reformulate the halo-galaxy lensing correlation in harmonic space. We find that, counter-intuitively, errors in the conventionally used flat-sky approximation remain at a % level even at very small angles. The errors increase at larger angles and for lensing halos at lower redshifts: the effect is at a few % level at the baryonic a…
Upcoming weak lensing surveys will survey large cosmological volumes to measure the growth of cosmological structure with time and thereby constrain dark energy. One major systematic uncertainty in this process is the calibration of the weak lensing shape distortions, or shears. Most upcoming surveys plan to test several aspects of their shear estimation algorithms using sophisticated image simulations that include realistic galaxy populations based on high-resolution data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). However, existing datasets from the (HST) cover very small cosmological volumes, so…
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) sourced by infrared emission from dusty star-forming galaxies is a valuable source of information on the star formation history of the Universe. In measurements of the millimeter sky at frequencies higher than $\sim 300$ GHz, the CIB and thermal emission from Galactic dust dominate. A limited understanding of the CIB contribution at lower frequencies on the other hand can hinder efforts to measure the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich spectrum on small scales as well as new physics that affects the damping tail of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The Planck s…
Combining different observational probes, such as galaxy clustering and weak lensing, is a promising technique for unveiling the physics of the Universe with upcoming dark energy experiments. Whilst this strategy significantly improves parameter constraints, decreasing the degeneracies of individual analyses and controlling the systematics, processing data from tens of millions of galaxies is not a trivial task. In this work we derive and test a new estimator for joint clustering and lensing data analysis, maximising the scientific return and decreasing the computational cost. Our estimator co…
Lensing of the CMB by modes that are larger than the size of the survey dilates intrinsic scales in the temperature and polarization fields and coherently shifts their observed power spectra with respect to the ensemble or all-sky mean. The effect can be simply encapsulated as a contribution to the power spectrum covariance matrix in accordance with the lensing trispectrum or as an additional parameter, the mean convergence in the field, for parameter estimation. It should be included for upcoming surveys that precisely measure acoustic polarization features deep into the damping tail at multi…
Strong Lensing Cosmology with Population-level Calibrated Neural Ratio Estimation
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory（费米国家加速器实验室）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI)（美国国家科学基金会-西蒙斯天空人工智能研究所）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
We describe the first spectroscopic tomographic (spectrotomographic) weak lensing measurement for a galaxy cluster based only on background galaxies with spectroscopically determined redshifts. We use the massive cluster A2029 to demonstrate the power of combining spectroscopy and lensing to obtain accurate masses and to overcome biases from contamination and photometric redshift errors. We detect the shear signal from the cluster at $>3.9 σ$. The shear signal scales with source redshift in a way that is consistent with the angular diameter distance ratio variation in a $Λ$CDM Universe. Furthe…
We measure the cross-correlation of cosmic microwave background lensing convergence maps derived from Atacama Cosmology Telescope data with galaxy lensing convergence maps as measured by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Stripe 82 Survey. The CMB-galaxy lensing cross power spectrum is measured for the first time with a significance of 4.2σ, which corresponds to a 12% constraint on the amplitude of density fluctuations at redshifts ~ 0.9. With upcoming improved lensing data, this novel type of measurement will become a powerful cosmological probe, providing a precise measurement of the mass di…
We study the impact of neglecting lensing magnification in galaxy clustering analyses for future galaxy surveys, considering the LambdaCDM model and two extensions: massive neutrinos and modifications of General Relativity. Our study focuses on the biases on the constraints and on the estimation of the cosmological parameters. We perform a comprehensive investigation of these two effects for the upcoming photometric and spectroscopic galaxy surveys Euclid and SKA for different redshift binning configurations. We also provide a fitting formula for the magnification bias of SKA. Our results show…
The detection of B-modes in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization by the BICEP2 experiment, if interpreted as evidence for a primordial gravitational wave background, has enormous ramifications for cosmology and physics. It is crucial to test this hypothesis with independent measurements. A gravitational wave background leads to B-modes in galaxy shape correlations (shear) both through lensing and tidal alignment effects. Since the systematics and foregrounds of galaxy shapes and CMB polarization are entirely different, a detection of a cross-correlation between the two observable…
We study the impact of baryonic physics on cosmological parameter estimation with weak lensing surveys. We run a set of cosmological hydrodynamics simulations with different galaxy formation models. We then perform ray-tracing simulations through the total matter density field to generate 100 independent convergence maps of 25 ${\rm deg}^2$ field-of-view, and use them to examine the ability of the following three lensing statistics as cosmological probes; power spectrum, peak counts, and Minkowski functionals. For the upcoming wide-field observations such as Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) surv…
Advances in upcoming weak lensing surveys pose new challenges for an accurate modeling of the lensing observables. The wide sky coverage of Euclid makes angular scales down to $l_\mathrm{min}=10$ accessible. At such large angular scales, general relativistic effects manifest themselves, and the lensing magnification cannot be correctly described by the standard lensing convergence only. The impact of line-of-sight velocities on the magnification angular power spectrum, referred to as the Doppler magnification, is already well recognized in literature. In particular, it was suggested that the D…
We explore the Minkowski functionals of weak lensing convergence map to distinguish between $f(R)$ gravity and the general relativity (GR). The mock weak lensing convergence maps are constructed with a set of high-resolution simulations assuming different gravity models. It is shown that the lensing MFs of $f(R)$ gravity can be considerably different from that of GR because of the environmentally dependent enhancement of structure formation. We also investigate the effect of lensing noise on our results, and find that it is likely to distinguish F5, F6 and GR gravity models with a galaxy surve…
We present a method that accurately propagates residual uncertainties in photometric redshift distributions into the cosmological inference from weak lensing measurements. The redshift distributions of tomographic redshift bins are parameterised using a flexible modified Gaussian mixture model. We fit this model to pre-calibrated redshift distributions and implement an analytic marginalisation over the potentially several hundred redshift nuisance parameters in the weak lensing likelihood, which is demonstrated to accurately recover the cosmological posterior. By iteratively fitting cosmologic…
The significant increase in precision that will be achieved by Stage IV cosmic shear surveys means that several currently used theoretical approximations may cease to be valid. An additional layer of complexity arises from the fact that many of these approximations are interdependent; the procedure to correct for one involves making another. Two such approximations that must be relaxed for upcoming experiments are the reduced shear approximation and the effect of neglecting magnification bias. Accomplishing this involves the calculation of the convergence bispectrum; typically subject to the L…
The upcoming new generation of spectroscopic galaxy redshift surveys will provide large samples of cosmic voids, the distinct, large underdense structures in the universe. Combining these with future galaxy imaging surveys, we study the prospects of probing the underlying matter distribution in and around cosmic voids via the weak gravitational lensing effects of stacked voids, utilizing both shear and magnification information. The statistical precision is greatly improved by stacking together a large number of voids along different lines of sight, even when taking into account the impact of …
We present a weak gravitational lensing analysis of 815 square degree of $i$-band imaging from the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-$i$-800). In contrast to the deep $r$-band observations, which take priority during excellent seeing conditions and form the primary KiDS dataset (KiDS-$r$-450), the complementary yet shallower KiDS-$i$-800 spans a wide range of observing conditions. The overlapping KiDS-$i$-800 and KiDS-$r$-450 imaging therefore provides a unique opportunity to assess the robustness of weak lensing measurements. In our analysis, we introduce two new `null' tests. The `nulled' two-point s…
Accurate galaxy cluster mass measurements from the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background temperature maps depend on mitigating potential biases from the cluster's own thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect signal. Quadratic lensing estimators use a pair of maps to extract the lensing signal: a large scale gradient map and a small scale lensing map. The SZ bias can be eliminated by using an SZ-free map in the pair, with the gradient map being favored for signal-to-noise reasons. However, while this approach eliminates the bias, the SZ power in small scale lensing map adds ext…
The rapidly improving precision of measurements of gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) also requires a corresponding increase in the precision of theoretical modeling. A commonly made approximation is to model the CMB deflection angle or lensing potential as a Gaussian random field. In this paper, however, we analytically quantify the influence of the non-Gaussianity of large-scale structure lenses, arising from nonlinear structure formation, on CMB lensing measurements. In particular, evaluating the impact of the non-zero bispectrum of large-scale structure on the r…
Weak lensing surveys exploit measurements of galaxy ellipticities. These measurements are subject to errors which degrade the cosmological information that can be extracted from the surveys. Here we propose a way of using the galaxy data themselves to calibrate the measurement errors. In particular, the cosmic shear field, which causes the galaxies to appear elliptical, also changes their sizes and fluxes. Information about the sizes and fluxes of the galaxies can be added to the shape information to obtain more robust information about the cosmic shear field. The net result will be tighter co…
We present and describe im3shape, a new publicly available galaxy shape measurement code for weak gravitational lensing shear. im3shape performs a maximum likelihood fit of a bulge-plus-disc galaxy model to noisy images, incorporating an applied point spread function. We detail challenges faced and choices made in its design and implementation, and then discuss various limitations that affect this and other maximum likelihood methods. We assess the bias arising from fitting an incorrect galaxy model using simple noise-free images and find that it should not be a concern for current cosmic shea…
We present a new cosmological analysis of the galaxy clusters in the Planck MMF3 cosmology sample with a cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing calibration of the cluster masses. As demonstrated by Planck, galaxy clusters detected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect offer a powerful way to constrain cosmological parameters such as $Ω_{\mathrm{m}}$ and $σ_8$. Determining the absolute cluster mass scale is, however, difficult, and some recent calibrations have yielded cosmological constraints in apparent tension with constraints in the $Λ$CDM model derived from the power spectra of the pri…
We quantify the cosmological constraining power of the `lensing PDF' - the one-point probability density of weak lensing convergence maps - by modelling this statistic numerically with an emulator trained on $w$CDM cosmic shear simulations. After validating our methods on Gaussian and lognormal fields, we show that `multi-scale' PDFs - measured from maps with multiple levels of smoothing - offer considerable gains over two-point statistics, owing to their ability to extract non-Gaussian information: for a mock Stage-III survey, lensing PDFs yield 33\% tighter constraints on the clustering para…
Gradually, the $Λ$CDM model starts to be challenged by observational data. Upcoming cosmological surveys will increase the number of detected galaxy clusters by several orders of magnitude. Therefore, shortly, clusters will provide tremendous constraints on cosmology and sharpen our understanding of structure formation. However, a reliable framework is required to analyse future Euclid-like catalogs. We build a cluster likelihood based on individual masses and forecast Euclid performances within this framework. We use a matched filter for weak lensing mass estimation and model its characterist…
We study the mass-richness relation using galaxy catalogues and images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We use two independent methods, in the first one, we calibrate the scaling relation with weak-lensing mass estimates. In the second procedure we apply a background subtraction technique to derive the probability distribution, $P(M \mid N)$, that groups with $N$-members have a virialized halo mass $M$. Lensing masses are derived in different richness bins for two galaxy systems sets: the maxBCG catalogue and a catalogue based on a group finder algorithm developed by Yang et al. MaxBCG resul…
We implement a model for the two-point statistics of biased tracers that combines dark matter dynamics from $N$-body simulations with an analytic Lagrangian bias expansion. Using Aemulus, a suite of $N$-body simulations built for emulation of cosmological observables, we emulate the cosmology dependence of these nonlinear spectra from redshifts $z = 0$ to $z=2$. We quantify the accuracy of our emulation procedure, which is sub-per cent at $k=1\, h {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ for the redshifts probed by upcoming surveys and improves at higher redshifts. We demonstrate its ability to describe the statistics…
Weak gravitational lensing has the potential to constrain cosmological parameters to high precision. However, as shown by the Shear TEsting Programmes (STEP) and GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing (GREAT) Challenges, measuring galaxy shears is a nontrivial task: various methods introduce different systematic biases which have to be accounted for. We investigate how pixel noise on the image affects the bias on shear estimates from a Maximum-Likelihood forward model-fitting approach using a sum of co-elliptical Sérsic profiles, in complement to the theoretical approach of an an associated pa…
The advent of Stage IV weak lensing surveys will open up a new era in precision cosmology. These experiments will offer more than an order-of-magnitude leap in precision over existing surveys, and we must ensure that the accuracy of our theory matches this. Accordingly, it is necessary to explicitly evaluate the impact of the theoretical assumptions made in current analyses on upcoming surveys. One effect typically neglected in present analyses is the Doppler-shift of the measured source comoving distances. Using Fisher matrices, we calculate the biases on the cosmological parameter values inf…
We study the observational signature of vector metric perturbations through the effect of weak gravitational lensing. In the presence of vector perturbations, the non-vanishing signals for B-mode cosmic shear and curl-mode deflection angle, which have never appeared in the case of scalar metric perturbations, naturally arise. Solving the geodesic and geodesic deviation equations, we drive the full-sky formulas for angular power spectra of weak lensing signals, and give the explicit expressions for E-/B-mode cosmic shear and gradient-/curl-mode deflection angle. As a possible source for seeding…
Although photometric redshifts (photo-z's) are crucial ingredients for current and upcoming large-scale surveys, the high-quality spectroscopic redshifts currently available to train, validate, and test them are substantially non-representative in both magnitude and color. We investigate the nature and structure of this bias by tracking how objects from a heterogeneous training sample contribute to photo-z predictions as a function of magnitude and color, and illustrate that the underlying redshift distribution at fixed color can evolve strongly as a function of magnitude. We then test the rob…
The number density of local maxima of weak lensing field, referred to as weak-lensing peak counts, can be used as a cosmological probe. However, its relevant cosmological information is still unclear. We study the relationship between the peak counts and other statistics in weak lensing field by using 1000 ray-tracing simulations. We construct a local transformation of lensing field $\cal K$ to a new Gaussian field $y$, named local-Gaussianized transformation. We calibrate the transformation with numerical simulations so that the one-point distribution and the power spectrum of $\cal K$ can be…
We present a new measurement of structure growth at $z \simeq 0.08$ obtained by correlating the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing potential map from the \textit{Planck} satellite with the angular distribution of the 2MASS Photometric Redshift galaxies. After testing for, and finding no evidence for systematic effects, we calculate the angular auto- and cross-power spectra. We combine these spectra to estimate the amplitude of structure growth using the bias-independent $D_G$ estimator introduced by Giannantonio et al. 2016. We find that the relative amplitude of $D_G$ with respect to t…
We study the cosmological information contained in the Minkowski Functionals (MFs) of weak gravitational lensing convergence maps. We show that the MFs provide strong constraints on the local type primordial non-Gaussianity parameter f_NL. We run a set of cosmological N-body simulations and perform ray-tracing simulations of weak lensing, to generate 100 independent convergence maps of 25 deg^2 field-of-view for f_NL = -100, 0 and 100. We perform a Fisher analysis to study the degeneracy among other cosmological parameters such as the dark energy equation of state parameter w and the fluctuati…
To take full advantage of the unprecedented power of upcoming weak lensing surveys, understanding the noise, such as cosmic variance and geometry/mask effects, is as important as understanding the signal itself. Accurately quantifying the noise requires a large number of statistically independent mocks for a variety of cosmologies. This is impractical for weak lensing simulations, which are costly for simultaneous requirements of large box size (to cover a significant fraction of the past light cone) and high resolution (to robustly probe the small scale where most lensing signal resides). The…
