Cosmological Constraints From Weak Lensing Peak Statistics With CFHT Stripe-82 Survey [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3683


We derived constraints on cosmological parameters using weak lensing peak statistics measured on the $\sim130~\rm{deg}^2$ of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Stripe82 Survey (CS82). This analysis, based on a fast GPU code, demonstrates the feasibility of using peak statistics in cosmological studies. For our measurements, we considered peaks with signal-to-noise ratio in the range of $\nu=[3,6]$. For a flat $\Lambda$CDM model with only $(\Omega_{\rm m}, \sigma_8)$ as free parameters, we constrained the parameters of the following relation $\Sigma_8=\sigma_8(\Omega_{\rm m}/0.27)^{\alpha}$ to be: $\Sigma_8=0.82 \pm 0.03 $ and $\alpha=0.43\pm 0.02$. The $\alpha$ value found is considerably smaller than the one measured in two-point and three-point cosmic shear correlation analyses, showing a significant complementarity of peak statistics to standard weak lensing cosmological studies. The derived constraints on $(\Omega_{\rm m}, \sigma_8)$ are fully consistent with the ones from either WMAP9 or current Planck (with a better agreement with WMAP9 results). From the weak lensing peak abundances alone, we obtained marginalised mean values of $\Omega_{\rm m}=0.38^{+0.27}_{-0.24}$ and $\sigma_8=0.81^{+0.26}_{-0.26}$. Finally, we also explored the potential of using weak lensing peak statistics to constrain the mass-concentration relation of dark matter halos simultaneously with cosmological parameters.

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X. Liu, C. Pan, R. Li, et. al.
Fri, 12 Dec 14
8/57

Comments: 15 pages, 10 figures, to be submitted to MNRAS