Monday

Weak Lensing Convergence Maps correspond closely to the projected matter field. Naturally, this makes them excellent probes of the Large Scale Structure of the Universe. Weak lensing peaks extracted from these maps offer complimentary statistics that can provide additional cosmological constraints. Furthermore, a significant amount of cosmological information is contained in peaks with small amplitudes, for which few models exist.

In this talk I will present a model for some universal properties in weak lensing peak statistics as a function of Omega_m and sigma_8. This is achieved by identifying a connection between the Peak Abundance and the Peak Two Point Correlation Function, which is able to describe the behaviour of small peaks. This model only requires a few free parameters, is robust to the choice of smoothing scale and is not significantly impacted by galaxy shape noise. I will then discuss how we can use this model to make predictions of the Peak Abundance and Peak Two Point Correlation Function to within a few percent.

The work developed here has a large range of applications, such as the fast generation of mock weak lensing peak catalogues. Cosmological constraints on Lambda CDM, Dark Energy, Modified Gravity, and the Neutrino mass sum can also be achieved with our model, which will be made possible with upcoming surveys such as Euclid and LSST.