We use the cosmic shear data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey to place constraints on $f(R)$ and {it Generalized Dilaton} models of modified gravity. This is highly complimentary to other probes since the constraints mainly come
from the non-linear scales: maximal deviations with respects to the General-Relativity + $Lambda$CDM scenario occurs at $ksim1 h mbox{Mpc}^{-1}$. At these scales, it becomes necessary to account for known degeneracies with baryon feedback and massive neutrinos, hence we place constraints jointly on these three physical effects. To achieve this, we formulate these modified gravity theories within a common tomographic parameterization, we compute their impact on the clustering properties relative to a GR universe, and propagate the observed modifications into the weak lensing $xi_{pm}$ quantity. Confronted against the cosmic shear data, we reject the $f(R)$ ${ |f_{R_0}|=10^{-4}, n=1}$ model with more than 99.9% confidence interval (CI) when assuming a $Lambda$CDM dark matter only model. In the presence of baryonic feedback processes and massive neutrinos with total mass up to 0.2eV, the model is disfavoured with at least 94% CI in all different combinations studied. Constraints on the ${ |f_{R_0}|=10^{-4}, n=2}$ model are weaker, but nevertheless disfavoured with at least 89% CI. We identify several specific combinations of neutrino mass, baryon feedback and $f(R)$ or Dilaton gravity models that are excluded by the current cosmic shear data. Notably, universes with three massless neutrinos and no baryon feedback are strongly disfavoured in all modified gravity scenarios studied. These results indicate that competitive constraints may be achieved with future cosmic shear data.
We use the cosmo-OWLS suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, which includes different galactic feedback models, to predict the cross-correlation signal between weak gravitational lensing and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) $y$-paramete
r. The predictions are compared to the recent detection reported by van Waerbeke and collaborators. The simulations reproduce the weak lensing-tSZ cross-correlation, $xi_{ykappa}(theta)$, well. The uncertainty arising from different possible feedback models appears to be important on small scales only ($theta lesssim 10$ arcmin), while the amplitude of the correlation on all scales is sensitive to cosmological parameters that control the growth rate of structure (such as $sigma_8$, $Omega_m$ and $Omega_b$). This study confirms our previous claim (in Ma et al.) that a significant proportion of the signal originates from the diffuse gas component in low-mass ($M_{rm{halo}} lesssim 10^{14} M_{odot}$) clusters as well as from the region beyond the virial radius. We estimate that approximately 20$%$ of the detected signal comes from low-mass clusters, which corresponds to about 30$%$ of the baryon density of the Universe. The simulations also suggest that more than half of the baryons in the Universe are in the form of diffuse gas outside halos ($gtrsim 5$ times the virial radius) which is not hot or dense enough to produce a significant tSZ signal or be observed by X-ray experiments. Finally, we show that future high-resolution tSZ-lensing cross-correlation observations will serve as a powerful tool for discriminating between different galactic feedback models.
(Abridged) The effect of baryonic feedback on the dark matter mass distribution is generally considered to be a nuisance to weak gravitational lensing. Measurements of cosmological parameters are affected as feedback alters the cosmic shear signal on
angular scales smaller than a few arcminutes. Recent progress on the numerical modelling of baryon physics has shown that this effect could be so large that, rather than being a nuisance, the effect can be constrained with current weak lensing surveys, hence providing an alternative astrophysical insight on one of the most challenging questions of galaxy formation. In order to perform our analysis, we construct an analytic fitting formula that describes the effect of the baryons on the mass power spectrum. This fitting formula is based on three scenarios of the OWL hydrodynamical simulations. It is specifically calibrated for $z<1.5$, where it models the simulations to an accuracy that is better than $2%$ for scales $k<10 hmbox{Mpc}^{-1}$ and better than $5%$ for $10 < k < 100 hmbox{Mpc}^{-1}$. Equipped with this precise tool, this paper presents the first constraint on baryonic feedback models using gravitational lensing data, from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). In this analysis, we show that the effect of neutrino mass on the mass power spectrum is degenerate with the baryonic feedback at small angular scales and cannot be ignored. Assuming a cosmology precision fixed by WMAP9, we find that a universe with no baryon feedback and massless neutrinos is rejected by the CFHTLenS lensing data with 96% confidence. Our study shows that ongoing weak gravitational lensing surveys (KiDS, HSC and DES) will offer a unique opportunity to probe the physics of baryons at galactic scales, in addition to the expected constraints on the total neutrino mass.
(Abridged) We investigate and quantify the impact of finite simulation volume on weak lensing two- and four-point statistics. These {it finite support} (FS) effects are modelled for several estimators, simulation box sizes and source redshifts, and v
alidated against a new large suite of 500 $N$-body simulations. The comparison reveals that our theoretical model is accurate to better than 5 per cent for the shear correlation function $xi_{+}(theta)$ and its error. We find that the most important quantities for FS modelling is the ratio between the measured angle $theta$ and the angular size of the simulation box at the source redshift, $theta_{box}(z_s)$, or the multipole equivalent $ell / ell_{box}(z_s)$. When this ratio reaches 0.1, independently of the source redshift, the shear correlation function $xi_+$ is suppressed by 5, 10, 20 and 25 percent for $L_{box}= 1000$, $500$, $250$ and $147mbox{Mpc}/h$ respectively. When it reaches 0.2, the suppression exceeds 25 percent even for the largest box. The same effect is observed in $xi_{-}(theta)$, but at much larger angles. This has important consequences for cosmological analyses using $N$-body simulations to calibrate the impact of non-linear gravitational clustering or to estimate errors and systematics effects, and should not be overlooked. We propose simple semi-analytic solutions to correct for these finite box effects with and without the presence of survey masks, and the method can be generalized to any weak lensing estimator. This offers a graceful solution to the important problem of estimating accurate covariance matrices for weak lensing studies: there is no need to run extra large simulation volumes, as long as the box effects are corrected.
(Abridged) Estimating the uncertainty on the matter power spectrum internally (i.e. directly from the data) is made challenging by the simple fact that galaxy surveys offer at most a few independent samples. In addition, surveys have non-trivial geom
etries, which make the interpretation of the observations even trickier, but the uncertainty can nevertheless be worked out within the Gaussian approximation. With the recent realization that Gaussian treatments of the power spectrum lead to biased error bars about the dilation of the baryonic acoustic oscillation scale, efforts are being directed towards developing non-Gaussian analyses, mainly from N-body simulations so far. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to tell how the non-Gaussian features observed in the simulations compare to those of the real Universe, and it is generally hard to tell at what level of accuracy the N-body simulations can model complicated non-linear effects such as mode coupling and galaxy bias. We propose in this paper a novel method that aims at measuring non-Gaussian error bars on the matter power spectrum directly from galaxy survey data. We utilize known symmetries of the 4-point function, Wiener filtering and principal component analysis to estimate the full covariance matrix from only four independent fields with minimal prior assumptions. With the noise filtering techniques and only four fields, we are able to recover the Fisher information obtained from a large N=200 sample to within 20 per cent, for k < 1.0 h/Mpc. Finally, we provide a prescription to extract a noise-filtered, non-Gaussian, covariance matrix from a handful of fields in the presence of a survey selection function.
Gravitational lensing surveys have now become large and precise enough that the interpretation of the lensing signal has to take into account an increasing number of theoretical limitations and observational biases. Since the lensing signal is the st
rongest at small angular scales, only numerical simulations can reproduce faithfully the non-linear dynamics and secondary effects at play. This work is the first of a series in which all gravitational lensing corrections known so far will be implemented in the same set of simulations, using realistic mock catalogues and non-Gaussian statistics. In this first paper, we present the TCS simulation suite and compute basic statistics such as the second and third order convergence and shear correlation functions. These simple tests set the range of validity of our simulations, which are resolving most of the signals at the sub-arc minute level (or $ell sim 10^4$). We also compute the non-Gaussian covariance matrix of several statistical estimators, including many that are used in the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). From the same realizations, we construct halo catalogues, computing a series of properties that are required by most galaxy population algorithms. These simulation products are publicly available for download.
We develop a purely mathematical tool to recover some of the information lost in the non-linear collapse of large-scale structure. From a set of 141 simulations of dark matter density fields, we construct a non-linear Weiner filter in order to separa
te Gaussian and non-Gaussian structure in wavelet space. We find that the non-Gaussian power is dominant at smaller scales, as expected from the theory of structure formation, while the Gaussian counterpart is damped by an order of magnitude on small scales. We find that it is possible to increase the Fisher information by a factor of three before reaching the translinear plateau, an effect comparable to other techniques like the linear reconstruction of the density field.
