Mitigating baryonic effects in weak lensing with higher-order statistics
Abstract
Weak gravitational lensing is a premier cosmological probe, but its small-scale statistical power is compromised by baryonic feedback. Higher-order statistics capture non-Gaussian information that the power spectrum misses, yet their sensitivity to feedback remains a concern for Stage IV surveys. We quantify how unmodeled feedback biases the cosmological parameters inferred from the angular power spectrum (PS), starlet peak counts, and the starlet ℓ1-norm, and we determine the scale cuts needed to remove that bias. We also test the Bernardeau-Nishimichi-Taruya (BNT) transform as a strategy for more precise scale cuts. Our analysis is based on the cosmoGRID V1 suite, which imprints feedback on dark matter convergence maps with a baryon correction model, and on simulation-based inference with neural posterior estimation, carried out across footprints ranging from Stage III-like to the full sky. We find that biases grow with survey area, exceeding 2σ for all three statistics at Stage IV-like footprints, and removing them costs a substantial fraction of the signal. Restricted to these ``baryon-safe'' scales, the starlet ℓ1-norm still reaches a figure of merit almost twice that of the PS. The BNT transform localizes the baryonic sensitivity to the lowest transformed redshift bin and improves the PS figure of merit by a factor of ∼1.4, while its linear mixing of shape noise inflates the contours of the map-based higher-order statistics. Higher-order statistics therefore deliver a substantial gain over the power spectrum with no baryonic modeling at all, and an even larger one as modeling improves.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{tersenov2026mitigating,
title = {{Mitigating baryonic effects in weak lensing with higher-order statistics}},
author = {Andreas Tersenov and Sacha Guerrini and Jean-Luc Starck and Martin Kilbinger},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.09131},
eprint = {2609.09131},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05770576v1},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Mitigating baryonic effects in weak lensing with higher-order statistics
AU - Andreas Tersenov
AU - Sacha Guerrini
AU - Jean-Luc Starck
AU - Martin Kilbinger
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - HAL
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.09131
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05770576v1
AB - Weak gravitational lensing is a premier cosmological probe, but its small-scale statistical power is compromised by baryonic feedback. Higher-order statistics capture non-Gaussian information that the power spectrum misses, yet their sensitivity to feedback remains a concern for Stage IV surveys. We quantify how unmodeled feedback biases the cosmological parameters inferred from the angular power spectrum (PS), starlet peak counts, and the starlet ℓ_1-norm, and we determine the scale cuts needed to remove that bias. We also test the Bernardeau-Nishimichi-Taruya (BNT) transform as a strategy for more precise scale cuts. Our analysis is based on the cosmoGRID V1 suite, which imprints feedback on dark matter convergence maps with a baryon correction model, and on simulation-based inference with neural posterior estimation, carried out across footprints ranging from Stage III-like to the full sky. We find that biases grow with survey area, exceeding 2σ for all three statistics at Stage IV-like footprints, and removing them costs a substantial fraction of the signal. Restricted to these ``baryon-safe'' scales, the starlet ℓ_1-norm still reaches a figure of merit almost twice that of the PS. The BNT transform localizes the baryonic sensitivity to the lowest transformed redshift bin and improves the PS figure of merit by a factor of ∼1.4, while its linear mixing of shape noise inflates the contours of the map-based higher-order statistics. Higher-order statistics therefore deliver a substantial gain over the power spectrum with no baryonic modeling at all, and an even larger one as modeling improves.
ER -