English

Constraining $\sigma_8$ with Lensing Statistics in Low and High Density Regions

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-11-04 v3

Abstract

Lensing studies are typically carried out around high density regions, such as groups and clusters, where the lensing signals are significant and indicative of rich density structures. However, a more comprehensive test of the cosmological model should also include the lensing effect in low density regions. In this work, we incorporate the stacked weak lensing signals around the low density positions, alongside galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy-galaxy two point correlation function to perform a joint cosmological analysis on σ8\sigma_8. The low density positions are constructed from the DR9 data release of the DESI legacy imaging survey, using galaxies with r-band absolute magnitude cut M<<-21.5 and in the redshift range of 0.18<<z<<0.28. In doing so, we simultaneously parameterize photometric redshift errors and halo mass uncertainties while building mock catalogs from simulations using the method of SubHalo Abundance Matching (SHAM). For the weak lensing measurements, we use the shear estimators derived from the DECaLS DR8 imaging data, processed by the Fourier_Quad pipeline. The survey boundaries and masks are fully taken into account. Our analysis achieves a total significance of 31.1σ31.1\sigma detection for lensing in the low density positions, which significantly improve the σ8\sigma_8 constraint compared to galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy-galaxy two point correlation function by 14%\%. For flat Λ\LambdaCDM model, we constrain σ8\sigma_8 =0.8240.015+0.0150.824^{+0.015}_{-0.015}, which shows a good agreement with the PLANCK result. Additionally, the halo mass uncertainty σlgM\sigma_{\lg M} and photometric redshift error σz\sigma_z are constrained to be 0.5650.070+0.0860.565^{+0.086}_{-0.070} and 0.0040.003+0.0040.004^{+0.004}_{-0.003} respectively, which are somewhat different from our expectations due to the significant degeneracy of the two parameters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.09956,
  title  = {Constraining $\sigma_8$ with Lensing Statistics in Low and High Density Regions},
  author = {Yiqi Huang and Fuyu Dong and Jun Zhang and Cong Liu and Hekun Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.09956},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

29 pages, 15 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:59:10.987Z