English

Cosmological studies from tomographic weak lensing peak abundances and impacts of photo-z errors

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2019-11-06 v1

Abstract

Weak lensing peak abundance analyses have been applied in different surveys and demonstrated to be a powerful statistics in extracting cosmological information complementary to cosmic shear two-point correlation studies. Future large surveys with high number densities of galaxies enable tomographic peak analyses. Focusing on high peaks, we investigate quantitatively how the tomographic redshift binning can enhance the cosmological gains. We also perform detailed studies about the degradation of cosmological information due to photometric redshift (photo-z) errors. We show that for surveys with the number density of galaxies 40arcmin2\sim40\,{\rm arcmin^{-2}}, the median redshift 1\sim1, and the survey area of 15000deg2\sim15000\,{\rm deg^{2}}, the 4-bin tomographic peak analyses can reduce the error contours of (Ωm,σ8)(\Omega_{{\rm m}},\sigma_{8}) by a factor of 55 comparing to 2-D peak analyses in the ideal case of photo-z error being absent. More redshift bins can hardly lead to significantly better constraints. The photo-z error model here is parametrized by zbiasz_{{\rm bias}} and σph\sigma_{{\rm ph}} and the fiducial values of zbias=0.003z_{{\rm bias}}=0.003 and σph=0.02\sigma_{{\rm ph}}=0.02 is taken. We find that using tomographic peak analyses can constrain the photo-z errors simultaneously with cosmological parameters. For 4-bin analyses, we can obtain σ(zbias)/zbias10%\sigma(z_{{\rm bias}})/z_{{\rm bias}}\sim10\% and σ(σph)/σph5%\sigma(\sigma_{{\rm ph}})/\sigma_{{\rm ph}}\sim5\% without assuming priors on them. Accordingly, the cosmological constraints on Ωm\Omega_{{\rm m}} and σ8\sigma_{8} degrade by a factor of 2.2\sim2.2 and 1.8\sim1.8, respectively, with respect to zero uncertainties on photo-z parameters. We find that the uncertainty of zbiasz_{{\rm bias}} plays more significant roles in degrading the cosmological constraints than that of σph\sigma_{{\rm ph}}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.11493,
  title  = {Cosmological studies from tomographic weak lensing peak abundances and impacts of photo-z errors},
  author = {Shuo Yuan and Chuzhong Pan and Xiangkun Liu and Qiao Wang and Zuhui Fan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.11493},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

18 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication on Astrophysical Journal