Analytical Predictions for Statistics of Cosmic Shear: Tests Against Simulations

Abstract

Weak gravitational lensing surveys are rapidly becoming important tools to probe directly the mass density fluctuations in the universe and its background dynamics. Earlier studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of the convergence field on small angular scales by suitably modeling the statistics of the underlying density field in the highly non-linear regime. We extend such methods to model the complete probability distribution function, PDF, of the shear as a function of smoothing angle. Our model relies on a simple hierarchical Ansatz for the behaviour of the higher-order correlations in the density field. We compare our predictions with the results of numerical simulations and find excellent agreement for different cosmological scenarios. Our method provides a new way to study the evolution of non-Gaussianity in gravitational clustering and should help to break the degeneracies in parameter estimation based on analysis of the power spectrum alone.

14 pages, final version published in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Cosmology with Weak Lensing Surveys
• From Weak Lensing to non-Gaussianity via Minkowski Functionals
• Weak lensing shear and aperture-mass from linear to non-linear scales
• Higher Order Statistics for Three-dimensional Shear and Flexion
• Higher-order Convergence Statistics for Three-dimensional Weak Gravitational Lensing
• Higher-order Statistics of Weak Lensing Shear and Flexion
• Raytracing simulations of coupled dark energy models
• Tomography and Weak lensing Statistics
• Source-lens clustering and intrinsic-alignment bias of weak-lensing estimators
• Estimating the Integrated Bispectrum from Weak Lensing Maps
• Morphology of Weak Lensing Convergence Maps
• The importance of the cosmic web and halo substructure for power spectra
• Covariance of Weak Lensing Observables
• The cumulant generating function as a novel observable to cumulate weak lensing information
• On Cross-correlating Weak Lensing Surveys
• Position-Dependent Correlation Function of Weak Lensing Convergence