Extreme value statistics of weak lensing shear peak counts

Abstract

The statistics of peaks in weak gravitational lensing maps is a promising technique to constrain cosmological parameters in present and future surveys. Here we investigate its power when using general extreme value statistics which is very sensitive to the exponential tail of the halo mass function. To this end, we use an analytic method to quantify the number of weak lensing peaks caused by galaxy clusters, large-scale structures and observational noise. Doing so, we further improve the method in the regime of high signal-to-noise ratios dominated by non-linear structures by accounting for the embedding of those counts into the surrounding shear caused by large scale structures. We derive the extreme value and order statistics for both over-densities (positive peaks) and under-densities (negative peaks) and provide an optimized criterion to split a wide field survey into sub-fields in order to sample the distribution of extreme values such that the expected objects causing the largest signals are mostly due to galaxy clusters. We find good agreement of our model predictions with a ray-tracing $N$-body simulation. For a Euclid-like survey, we find tight constraints on ${\sigma }_8$ and ${\Omega }_{\text{m}}$ with relative uncertainties of $\sim 10^{-3}$. In contrast, the equation of state parameter $w_0$ can be constrained only with a $10\%$ level, and $w_{\text{a}}$ is out of reach even if we include redshift information.

14 pages, 11 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS, one figure added, little changes in the manuscript, added references

References in corpus (4)

• Testing the reliability of weak lensing cluster detections
• Constraints on ${\Omega }_{\mathrm{m}}$ and ${\sigma }_8$ from the potential-based cluster temperature function
• The impact of spurious shear on cosmological parameter estimates from weak lensing observables
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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Cosmology constraints from shear peak statistics in Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data
• AMICO galaxy clusters in KiDS-DR3: cosmological constraints from counts and stacked weak-lensing
• On the implementation of the spherical collapse model for dark energy models
• Do dark matter halos explain lensing peaks?
• Abell 2744: Too much substructure for Lambda CDM?
• Weak lensing peak statistics in the era of large scale cosmological surveys
• Weak Lensing Peaks in Simulated Light-Cones: Investigating the Coupling between Dark Matter and Dark Energy
• Clustering of Local Extrema in Planck CMB maps
• Spherical collapse of dark matter haloes in tidal gravitational fields
• Projection effects of large-scale structures on weak-lensing peak abundances
• Shear and vorticity in the spherical collapse of dark matter haloes
• Effects of tidal gravitational fields in clustering dark energy models
• Probabilistic Cosmological Mass Mapping from Weak Lensing Shear
• AMICO galaxy clusters in KiDS-DR3: constraints on $\Lambda$CDM from extreme value statistics
• Non-linear infusion of intrinsic alignment and source clustering: impact on non-Gaussian cosmic shear statistics