A new stochastic approach to cumulative weak lensing
Abstract
We study the weak gravitational lensing effects caused by a stochastic distribution of dark matter halos. We develop a simple approach to calculate the magnification probability distribution function which allows us to easily compute the magnitude bias and dispersion for an arbitrary data sample and a given universe model. As an application we consider the effects of single-mass large-scale cosmic inhomogeneities to the SNe magnitude-redshift relation, and conclude that such structures could bias the PDF enough to affect the extraction of cosmological parameters from the limited size of present-day SNe data samples. We also release turboGL, a simple and very fast (<= 1s) Mathematica code based on the method here presented.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0909.0822,
title = {A new stochastic approach to cumulative weak lensing},
author = {Kimmo Kainulainen and Valerio Marra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.0822},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
20 pages, 11 figures; replaced to match the version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D. The turboGL package [v0.3] can be downloaded at http://www.turbogl.org/