Cosmological Constraints From Weak Lensing Peak Statistics With CFHT Stripe 82 Survey

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.

Mask Effects on Cosmological Studies with Weak Lensing Peak Statistics

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.