No Arabic abstract
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 $sigma_{{rm ph}}$.
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 $3arcmin. For the remained part, we treat the areas close to and away from the masked regions separately with different noise levels. It is shown that this two-noise-level model can account for the mask effect on peak statistics very well and the cosmological bias is significantly reduced.
We present cosmological parameter constraints from a tomographic weak gravitational lensing analysis of ~450deg$^2$ of imaging data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS). For a flat $Lambda$CDM cosmology with a prior on $H_0$ that encompasses the most recent direct measurements, we find $S_8equivsigma_8sqrt{Omega_{rm m}/0.3}=0.745pm0.039$. This result is in good agreement with other low redshift probes of large scale structure, including recent cosmic shear results, along with pre-Planck cosmic microwave background constraints. A $2.3$-$sigma$ tension in $S_8$ and `substantial discordance in the full parameter space is found with respect to the Planck 2015 results. We use shear measurements for nearly 15 million galaxies, determined with a new improved `self-calibrating version of $lens$fit validated using an extensive suite of image simulations. Four-band $ugri$ photometric redshifts are calibrated directly with deep spectroscopic surveys. The redshift calibration is confirmed using two independent techniques based on angular cross-correlations and the properties of the photometric redshift probability distributions. Our covariance matrix is determined using an analytical approach, verified numerically with large mock galaxy catalogues. We account for uncertainties in the modelling of intrinsic galaxy alignments and the impact of baryon feedback on the shape of the non-linear matter power spectrum, in addition to the small residual uncertainties in the shear and redshift calibration. The cosmology analysis was performed blind. Our high-level data products, including shear correlation functions, covariance matrices, redshift distributions, and Monte Carlo Markov Chains are available at http://kids.strw.leidenuniv.nl.
In this manuscript of the habilitation `a diriger des recherches (HDR), the author presents some of his work over the last ten years. The main topic of this thesis is cosmic shear, the distortion of images of distant galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure in the Universe. Cosmic shear has become a powerful probe into the nature of dark matter and the origin of the current accelerated expansion of the Universe. Over the last years, cosmic shear has evolved into a reliable and robust cosmological probe, providing measurements of the expansion history of the Universe and the growth of its structure. I review the principles of weak gravitational lensing and show how cosmic shear is interpreted in a cosmological context. Then I give an overview of weak-lensing measurements, and present observational results from the Canada-France Hawaii Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS), as well as the implications for cosmology. I conclude with an outlook on the various future surveys and missions, for which cosmic shear is one of the main science drivers, and discuss promising new weak cosmological lensing techniques for future observations.
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.
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.