No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
In this work we present a lensing study of Compact Groups (CGs) using data obtained from the high quality Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Stripe 82 Survey. Using stacking techniques we obtain the average density contrast profile. We analyse the lensing signal dependence on the groups surface brightness and morphological content, for CGs in the redshift range $z = 0.2 - 0.4$. We obtain a larger lensing signal for CGs with higher surface brightness, probably due to their lower contamination by interlopers. Also, we find a strong dependence of the lensing signal on the group concentration parameter, with the most concentrated quintile showing a significant lensing signal, consistent with an isothermal sphere with $sigma_V =336 pm 28$ km/s and a NFW profile with $R_{200}=0.60pm0.05$ $h_{70}^{-1}$Mpc. We also compare lensing results with dynamical estimates finding a good agreement with lensing determinations for CGs with higher surface brightness and higher concentration indexes. On the other hand, CGs that are more contaminated by interlopers show larger dynamical dispersions, since interlopers bias dynamical estimates to larger values, although the lensing signal is weakened.
We study the statistics of peaks in a weak lensing reconstructed mass map of the first 450 square degrees of the Kilo Degree Survey. The map is computed with aperture masses directly applied to the shear field with an NFW-like compensated filter. We compare the peak statistics in the observations with that of simulations for various cosmologies to constrain the cosmological parameter $S_8 = sigma_8 sqrt{Omega_{rm m}/0.3}$, which probes the ($Omega_{rm m}, sigma_8$) plane perpendicularly to its main degeneracy. We estimate $S_8=0.750pm0.059$, using peaks in the signal-to-noise range $0 leq {rm S/N} leq 4$, and accounting for various systematics, such as multiplicative shear bias, mean redshift bias, baryon feedback, intrinsic alignment, and shear-position coupling. These constraints are $sim25%$ tighter than the constraints from the high significance peaks alone ($3 leq {rm S/N} leq 4$) which typically trace single-massive halos. This demonstrates the gain of information from low-S/N peaks. However we find that including ${rm S/N} < 0$ peaks does not add further information. Our results are in good agreement with the tomographic shear two-point correlation function measurement in KiDS-450. Combining shear peaks with non-tomographic measurements of the shear two-point correlation functions yields a $sim20%$ improvement in the uncertainty on $S_8$ compared to the shear two-point correlation functions alone, highlighting the great potential of peaks as a cosmological probe.
We use weak lensing data from the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey to measure the second- and third-moments of the cosmic shear field, estimated from about 450,000 galaxies with average redshift <z> ~ 1.3. We measure two- and three-point shear statistics using a tree-code, dividing the signal in E, B and mixed components. We present a detection of the third-order moment of the aperture mass statistic and verify that the measurement is robust against systematic errors caused by point spread function (PSF) residuals and by the intrinsic alignments between galaxies. The amplitude of the measured three-point cosmic shear signal is in very good agreement with the predictions for a WMAP7 best-fit model, whereas the amplitudes of potential systematics are consistent with zero. We make use of three sets of large Lambda CDM simulations to test the accuracy of the cosmological predictions and to estimate the influence of the cosmology-dependent covariance. We perform a likelihood analysis using the measurement and find that the Omega_m-sigma_8 degeneracy direction is well fitted by the relation: sigma_8 (Omega_m/0.30)^(0.49)=0.78+0.11/-0.26. We present the first measurement of a more generalised three-point shear statistic and find a very good agreement with the WMAP7 best-fit cosmology. The cosmological interpretation of this measurement gives sigma_8 (Omega_m/0.30)^(0.46)=0.69 +0.08/-0.14. Furthermore, the combined likelihood analysis of this measurement with the measurement of the second order moment of the aperture mass improves the accuracy of the cosmological constraints, showing the high potential of this combination of measurements to infer cosmological constraints.
In order to extract full cosmological information from next-generation large and high-precision weak lensing (WL) surveys (e.g. Euclid, Roman, LSST), higher-order statistics that probe the small-scale, non-linear regime of large scale structure (LSS) need to be utilized. WL peak counts, which trace overdensities in the cosmic web, are one promising and simple statistic for constraining cosmological parameters. The physical origin of WL peaks have previously been linked to dark matter halos along the line of sight and this peak-halo connection has been used to develop various semi-analytic halo-based models for predicting peak counts. Here, we study the origin of WL peaks and the effectiveness of halo-based models for WL peak counts using a suite of ray-tracing N-body simulations. We compare WL peaks in convergence maps from the full simulations to those in maps created from only particles associated with halos -- the latter playing the role of a perfect halo model. We find that while halo-only contributions are able to replicate peak counts qualitatively well, halos do not explain all WL peaks. Halos particularly underpredict negative peaks, which are associated with local overdensities in large-scale underdense regions along the line of sight. In addition, neglecting non-halo contributions to peaks counts leads to a significant bias on the parameters ($Omega_{rm m}$, $sigma_{8}$) for surveys larger than $geq$ 100 deg$^{2}$. We conclude that other elements of the cosmic web, outside and far away from dark matter halos, need to be incorporated into models of WL peaks in order to infer unbiased cosmological constraints.