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In this paper, we analyze in detail with numerical simulations how the mask effect can influence the weak lensing peak statistics reconstructed from the shear measurement of background galaxies. It is found that high peak fractions are systematically enhanced due to masks, the larger the masked area, the higher the enhancement. In the case with about $13%$ of the total masked area, the fraction of peaks with SNR $ uge 3$ is $sim 11%$ in comparison with $sim 7%$ of the mask-free case in our considered cosmological model. This can induce a large bias on cosmological studies with weak lensing peak statistics. Even for a survey area of $9hbox{ deg}^2$, the bias in $(Omega_m, sigma_8)$ is already close to $3sigma$. It is noted that most of the affected peaks are close to the masked regions. Therefore excluding peaks in those regions can reduce the bias but at the expense of loosing usable survey areas. Further investigations find that the enhancement of high peaks number can be largely attributed to higher noise led by the fewer number of galaxies usable in the reconstruction. Based on Fan et al. (2010), we develop a model in which we exclude only those large masks with radius larger than $3arcmin. For the remained part, we treat the areas close to and away from the masked regions separately with different noise levels. It is shown that this two-noise-level model can account for the mask effect on peak statistics very well and the cosmological bias is significantly reduced.
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Upcoming weak-lensing surveys have the potential to become leading cosmological probes provided all systematic effects are under control. Recently, the ejection of gas due to feedback energy from active galactic nuclei (AGN) has been identified as major source of uncertainty, challenging the success of future weak-lensing probes in terms of cosmology. In this paper we investigate the effects of baryons on the number of weak-lensing peaks in the convergence field. Our analysis is based on full-sky convergence maps constructed via light-cones from $N$-body simulations, and we rely on the baryonic correction model of Schneider et al. (2019) to model the baryonic effects on the density field. As a result we find that the baryonic effects strongly depend on the Gaussian smoothing applied to the convergence map. For a DES-like survey setup, a smoothing of $theta_kgtrsim8$ arcmin is sufficient to keep the baryon signal below the expected statistical error. Smaller smoothing scales lead to a significant suppression of high peaks (with signal-to-noise above 2), while lower peaks are not affected. The situation is more severe for a Euclid-like setup, where a smoothing of $theta_kgtrsim16$ arcmin is required to keep the baryonic suppression signal below the statistical error. Smaller smoothing scales require a full modelling of baryonic effects since both low and high peaks are strongly affected by baryonic feedback.
We derived constraints on cosmological parameters using weak lensing peak statistics measured on the $sim130~{rm deg}^2$ of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Stripe 82 Survey (CS82). This analysis demonstrates the feasibility of using peak statistics in cosmological studies. For our measurements, we considered peaks with signal-to-noise ratio in the range of $ u=[3,6]$. For a flat $Lambda$CDM model with only $(Omega_{rm m}, sigma_8)$ as free parameters, we constrained the parameters of the following relation $Sigma_8=sigma_8(Omega_{rm m}/0.27)^{alpha}$ to be: $Sigma_8=0.82 pm 0.03 $ and $alpha=0.43pm 0.02$. The $alpha$ value found is considerably smaller than the one measured in two-point and three-point cosmic shear correlation analyses, showing a significant complement of peak statistics to standard weak lensing cosmological studies. The derived constraints on $(Omega_{rm m}, sigma_8)$ are fully consistent with the ones from either WMAP9 or Planck. From the weak lensing peak abundances alone, we obtained marginalised mean values of $Omega_{rm m}=0.38^{+0.27}_{-0.24}$ and $sigma_8=0.81pm 0.26$. Finally, we also explored the potential of using weak lensing peak statistics to constrain the mass-concentration relation of dark matter halos simultaneously with cosmological parameters.
Weak lensing peak counts are a powerful statistical tool for constraining cosmological parameters. So far, this method has been applied only to surveys with relatively small areas, up to several hundred square degrees. As future surveys will provide weak lensing datasets with size of thousands of square degrees, the demand on the theoretical prediction of the peak statistics will become heightened. In particular, large simulations of increased cosmological volume are required. In this work, we investigate the possibility of using simulations generated with the fast Comoving-Lagrangian acceleration (COLA) method, coupled to the convergence map generator Ufalcon, for predicting the peak counts. We examine the systematics introduced by the COLA method by comparing it with a full TreePM code. We find that for a 2000 deg$^2$ survey, the systematic error is much smaller than the statistical error. This suggests that the COLA method is able to generate promising theoretical predictions for weak lensing peaks. We also examine the constraining power of various configurations of data vectors, exploring the influence of splitting the sample into tomographic bins and combining different smoothing scales. We find the combination of smoothing scales to have the most constraining power, improving the constraints on the $S_8$ amplitude parameter by at least 40% compared to a single smoothing scale, with tomography brining only limited increase in measurement precision.
Weak lensing peak abundance analyses have been applied in different surveys and demonstrated to be a powerful statistics in extracting cosmological information complementary to cosmic shear two-point correlation studies. Future large surveys with high number densities of galaxies enable tomographic peak analyses. Focusing on high peaks, we investigate quantitatively how the tomographic redshift binning can enhance the cosmological gains. We also perform detailed studies about the degradation of cosmological information due to photometric redshift (photo-z) errors. We show that for surveys with the number density of galaxies $sim40,{rm arcmin^{-2}}$, the median redshift $sim1$, and the survey area of $sim15000,{rm deg^{2}}$, the 4-bin tomographic peak analyses can reduce the error contours of $(Omega_{{rm m}},sigma_{8})$ by a factor of $5$ comparing to 2-D peak analyses in the ideal case of photo-z error being absent. More redshift bins can hardly lead to significantly better constraints. The photo-z error model here is parametrized by $z_{{rm bias}}$ and $sigma_{{rm ph}}$ and the fiducial values of $z_{{rm bias}}=0.003$ and $sigma_{{rm ph}}=0.02$ is taken. We find that using tomographic peak analyses can constrain the photo-z errors simultaneously with cosmological parameters. For 4-bin analyses, we can obtain $sigma(z_{{rm bias}})/z_{{rm bias}}sim10%$ and $sigma(sigma_{{rm ph}})/sigma_{{rm ph}}sim5%$ without assuming priors on them. Accordingly, the cosmological constraints on $Omega_{{rm m}}$ and $sigma_{8}$ degrade by a factor of $sim2.2$ and $sim1.8$, respectively, with respect to zero uncertainties on photo-z parameters. We find that the uncertainty of $z_{{rm bias}}$ plays more significant roles in degrading the cosmological constraints than that of $sigma_{{rm ph}}$.
High peaks in weak lensing (WL) maps originate dominantly from the lensing effects of single massive halos. Their abundance is therefore closely related to the halo mass function and thus a powerful cosmological probe. On the other hand, however, besides individual massive halos, large-scale structures (LSS) along lines of sight also contribute to the peak signals. In this paper, with ray tracing simulations, we investigate the LSS projection effects. We show that for current surveys with a large shape noise, the stochastic LSS effects are subdominant. For future WL surveys with source galaxies having a median redshift $z_{mathrm{med}}sim1$ or higher, however, they are significant. For the cosmological constraints derived from observed WL high peak counts, severe biases can occur if the LSS effects are not taken into account properly. We extend the model of citet{Fan2010} by incorporating the LSS projection effects into the theoretical considerations. By comparing with simulation results, we demonstrate the good performance of the improved model and its applicability in cosmological studies.
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