English

Morphology of Weak Lensing Convergence Maps

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2021-09-01 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study the morphology of convergence maps by perturbatively reconstructing their Minkowski Functionals (MFs). We present a systematics study using a set of three generalised skew-spectra as a function of source redshift and smoothing angular scale. Using an approach based on pseudo-SS_{\ell}s (PSL) we show how these spectra will allow reconstruction of MFs in the presence of an arbitrary mask and inhomogeneous noise in an unbiased way. Our theoretical predictions are based on a recently introduced fitting function to the bispectrum. We compare our results against state-of-the art numerical simulations and find an excellent agreement. The reconstruction can be carried out in a controlled manner as a function of angular harmonics \ell and source redshift zsz_s which allows for a greater handle on any possible sources of non-Gaussianity. Our method has the advantage of estimating the topology of convergence maps directly using shear data. We also study weak lensing convergence maps inferred from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations; and we find that, though less significant at low redshift, the post-Born corrections play an important role in any modelling of the non-Gaussianity of convergence maps at higher redshift. We also study the cross-correlations of estimates from different tomographic bins.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.05669,
  title  = {Morphology of Weak Lensing Convergence Maps},
  author = {D. Munshi and T. Namikawa and J. D. McEwen and T. D. Kitching and F. R. Bouchet},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.05669},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

16 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:16:35.261Z