Cosmology with the shear-peak statistics

By J. Dietrich, J. Hartlap. 2009

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weak-lensing searches for galaxy clusters are plagued by low completeness and purity, severely limiting their usefulness for constraining cosmological parameters with the cluster mass function. A significant fraction of ‘false positives’ are due to projection of large-scale structure and as such carry information about the matter distribution. We demonstrate that by constructing a “peak function”, in analogy to the cluster mass function, cosmological parameters can be constrained. To this end we carried out a large number of cosmological N-body simulations in the m-σ8 plane to study the variation of this peak function. We demonstrate that the peak statistics is able to provide constraints competitive with those obtained from cosmic-shear tomography from the same data set. By taking the full cross-covariance between the peak statistics and cosmic shear into account, we show that the combination of both methods leads to tighter constraints than either method alone can provide.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd8abc0702d0eea5ed8133efbea4632defce243f

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Citations in the corpus

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “That said, the shear peak abundance is an observable that can be predicted from numerical simulations in much the same way as the halo mass function, and this approach may well yield useful cosmological constraints (e.g., Marian et al., 2009; Dietrich and Hartlap, 2010).”
Gravitational lensing (2010, background): “Their statistical analysis is likely to provide important information on the evolution of nonlinear cosmic structures in the near future [104, 316].”
Galaxy Alignments: Observations and Impact on Cosmology (2015, background): “Pires et al. (2012) showed that these peak counts capture rich non-Gaussian information beyond the skewness and kurtosis of the distribution, while Dietrich & Hartlap (2010) showed significant statistical improvement when peak counts were combined with two-point statistics.”
Weak Gravitational Lensing (2012, methodology): “Peaks can be also counted on the shear field using a filtered version of the shear [20].”
Weighing the Giants - I. Weak-lensing masses for 51 massive galaxy clusters: project overview, data analysis methods and cluster images (2012, result): “The frequency of occurrence of such alignment peaks that do not correspond to massive, virialized halos is consistent with expectations (Hamana et al. 2004; Dietrich & Hartlap 2010).”