Higher order moments of lensing convergence - I. Estimate from simulations

Abstract

Large area lensing surveys are expected to make it possible to use cosmic shear tomography as a tool to severely constrain cosmological parameters. To this end, one typically relies on second order statistics such as the two - point correlation fucntion and its Fourier counterpart, the power spectrum. Moving a step forward, we wonder whether and to which extent higher order stastistics can improve the lensing Figure of Merit (FoM). In this first paper of a series, we investigate how second, third and fourth order lensing convergence moments can be measured and use as probe of the underlying cosmological model. We use simulated data and investigate the impact on moments estimate of the map reconstruction procedure, the cosmic variance, and the intrinsic ellipticity noise. We demonstrate that, under realistic assumptions, it is indeed possible to use higher order moments as a further lensing probe.

13 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables, submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (1)

• Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Final Report

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Dark Energy Survey Year 3 results: curved-sky weak lensing mass map reconstruction
• Enhancing cosmic shear with the multi-scale lensing PDF
• A comparative study of cosmological constraints from weak lensing using Convolutional Neural Networks
• Minkowski Functionals in Joint Galaxy Clustering & Weak Lensing Analyses
• Dark Energy Survey Year 3 results: cosmology with moments of weak lensing mass maps
• Reconstruction of weak lensing mass maps for non-Gaussian studies in the celestial sphere
• AKRA 2.0: Accurate Kappa Reconstruction Algorithm for masked shear catalog