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Minkowski functionals of convergence maps and the lensing figure of merit

M. Vicinanza, V. F. Cardone, R. Maoli, R. Scaramella, X. Er, I. Tereno

Abstract

Minkowski functionals (MFs) quantify the topological properties of a given field probing its departure from Gaussianity. We investigate their use on lensing convergence maps in order to see whether they can provide further insights on the underlying cosmology with respect to the standard second-order statistics, i.e., cosmic shear tomography. To this end, we first present a method to match theoretical predictions with measured MFs taking care of the shape noise, imperfections in the map reconstruction, and inaccurate description of the nonlinearites in the matter power spectrum and bispectrum. We validate this method against simulated maps reconstructed from shear fields generated by the MICE simulation. We then perform a Fisher matrix analysis to forecast the accuracy on cosmological parameters from a joint MFs and shear tomography analysis. It turns out that MFs are indeed helpful to break the Ωm8 degeneracy, thus generating a sort of chain reaction leading to an overall increase of the figure of merit.

Keywords
Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Physical Review D
Volume 99, Issue 4
2019 February

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Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia COMPETE 2020 PORTUGAL 2020 União Europeia