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.
At linear order in cosmological perturbations, departures from the growth in the cosmological standard model can be quantified in terms of two functions of redshift $z$ and Fourier number $k$. Previous studies have performed principal component forec
asts for several choices of these two functions, based on expected capabilities of upcoming large structure surveys. It is typically found that there will be many well-constrained degrees of freedom. However, not all and, probably most, of these degrees of freedom were physical if the parametrization had allowed for an arbitrary $k$-dependence. In this paper, we restrict the $k$-dependence to that allowed in local theories of gravity under the quasi-static approximation, i.e. ratios of polynomials in $k$, and identify the best constrained features in the ($z$,$k$)-dependence of the commonly considered functions $mu$ and $gamma$ as measured by an LSST-like weak lensing survey. We estimate the uncertainty in the measurements of the eigenmodes of modified growth. We find that imposing the theoretical prior on $k$-dependence reduces the number of degrees of freedom and the covariance between parameters. On the other hand, imaging surveys like LSST are not as sensitive to the $z$-dependence as they are to the $k$-dependence of the modified growth functions. This trade off provides us with, more or less, the same number of well-constrained eigenmodes (with respect to our prior) as found before, but now these modes are physical.
We study degeneracies between parameters in some of the widely used parametrized modified gravity models. We investigate how different observables from a future photometric weak lensing survey such as LSST, correlate the effects of these parameters a
nd to what extent the degeneracies are broken. We also study the impact of other degenerate effects, namely massive neutrinos and some of the weak lensing systematics, on the correlations.
The next generation of weak lensing surveys will trace the evolution of matter perturbations and gravitational potentials from the matter dominated epoch until today. Along with constraining the dynamics of dark energy, they will probe the relations
between matter overdensities, local curvature, and the Newtonian potential. We work with two functions of time and scale to account for any modifications of these relations in the linear regime from those in the LCDM model. We perform a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to find the eigenmodes and eigenvalues of these functions for surveys like DES and LSST. This paper builds on and significantly extends the PCA analysis of Zhao et al. (2009) in several ways. In particular, we consider the impact of some of the systematic effects expected in weak lensing surveys. We also present the PCA in terms of other choices of the two functions needed to parameterize modified growth on linear scales, and discuss their merits. We analyze the degeneracy between the modified growth functions and other cosmological parameters, paying special attention to the effective equation of state w(z). Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the PCA as an efficient data compression stage which enables one to easily derive constraints on parameters of specific models without recalculating Fisher matrices from scratch.
