Jessica Cowell

Abstract:

Abstract We present the first application of marked power spectra to weak lensing data, using maps from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 1 (HSC-Y1) survey. Marked convergence fields, constructed by weighting the convergence field with non-linear functions of its smoothed version, are designed to encode higher-order information while remaining computationally tractable. Using simulations tailored to the HSC-Y1 data, we test three mark functions that up- or down-weight different density environments. Our results show that combining multiple types of marked auto- and cross-spectra improves constraints on the clustering amplitude parameter $S_8\equiv \sigma _8\sqrt{\Omega _{\rm m}/0.3}$ by ≈43 percnt compared to standard two-point power spectra. When applied to the HSC-Y1 data, this translates into a constraint on S8 = 0.807 ± 0.024. We assess the sensitivity of the marked power spectra to systematics, including baryonic effects, intrinsic alignment, photometric redshifts, and multiplicative shear bias. We note that some of the additional information introduced by the marked field originates from scales smaller than the scale cut, and is partly Gaussian in nature. This does not invalidate our systematic tests. These results demonstrate the promise of marked statistics as a practical and powerful tool for extracting non-Gaussian information from weak lensing surveys.

Abstract:

Abstract:

Marked power spectra provide a computationally efficient way to extract non-Gaussian information from the matter density field using the usual analysis tools developed for the power spectrum without the need for explicit calculation of higher-order correlators. In this work, we explore the optimal form of the mark function used for re-weighting the density field, to maximally constrain cosmology. We show that adding to the mark function or multiplying it by a constant leads to no additional information gain, which significantly reduces our search space for optimal marks. We quantify the information gain of this optimal function and compare it against mark functions previously proposed in the literature. We find that we can gain around ∼2 times smaller errors in 𝜎8 and ∼4 times smaller errors in Ω𝑚 compared to using the traditional power spectrum alone, an improvement of ∼60% compared to other proposed marks when applied to the same data set.