English

Full-sky lensing shear at second order

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2010-04-14 v2

Abstract

We compute the reduced cosmic shear up to second order in the gravitational potential without relying on the small angle or thin-lens approximation. This is obtained by solving the Sachs equation which describes the deformation of the infinitesimal cross-section of light bundle in the optical limit, and maps galaxy intrinsic shapes into their angular images. The calculation is done in the Poisson gauge without a specific matter content, including vector and tensor perturbations generated at second order and taking account of the inhomogeneities of a fixed redshift source plane. Our final result is expressed in terms of spin-2 operators on the sphere and is valid on the full sky. Beside the well known lens-lens and Born corrections that dominate on small angular scales, we find new non-linear couplings. These are a purely general relativistic intrinsic contribution, a coupling between the gravitational potential at the source with the lens, couplings between the time delay with the lens, couplings between two photon deflections, as well as non-linear couplings due to the second-order vector and tensor components. The inhomogeneity in the redshift of the source induces a coupling between the photon redshift with the lens. All these corrections become important on large angular scales and should thus be included when computing higher-order observables such as the bispectrum, in full or partially full-sky surveys.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0911.2244,
  title  = {Full-sky lensing shear at second order},
  author = {Francis Bernardeau and Camille Bonvin and Filippo Vernizzi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0911.2244},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

29 pages, discussion about the first-order convergence added, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:10:28.801Z