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Weak lensing minima and peaks: Cosmological constraints and the impact of baryons

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Coulton, WR 
Liu, J 
McCarthy, IG 
Osato, K 

Abstract

We present a novel statistic to extract cosmological information in weak lensing data: the lensing minima. We also investigate the effect of baryons on the cosmological constraints from peak and minimum counts. Using the \texttt{MassiveNuS} simulations, we find that lensing minima are sensitive to non-Gaussian cosmological information and are complementary to the lensing power spectrum and peak counts. For an LSST-like survey, we obtain 95% credible intervals from a combination of lensing minima and peaks that are significantly stronger than from the power spectrum alone, by 44%, 11%, and 63% for the neutrino mass sum mν, matter density Ωm, and amplitude of fluctuation As, respectively. We explore the effect of baryonic processes on lensing minima and peaks using the hydrodynamical simulations \texttt{BAHAMAS} and \texttt{Osato15}. We find that ignoring baryonic effects would lead to strong (≈4σ) biases in inferences from peak counts, but negligible (≈0.5σ) for minimum counts, suggesting lensing minima are a potentially more robust tool against baryonic effects. Finally, we demonstrate that the biases can in principle be mitigated without significantly degrading cosmological constraints when we model and marginalize the baryonic effects.

Description

Keywords

gravitational lensing: weak, neutrinos, methods: statistical, galaxies: haloes, cosmological parameters

Journal Title

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0035-8711
1365-2966

Volume Title

495

Publisher

Oxford University Press
Sponsorship
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/N000927/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/S000623/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/J005673/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/K00333X/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/L000636/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/M007065/1)
STFC (ST/M007073/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/P000673/1)
STFC (ST/T00049X/1)
UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (grant number ST/N000927/1).