# Statistics of Dark Matter Halos from Gravitational Lensing

## 1. Introduction

In the coming years, gravitational lensing is likely to become an effective tool for mapping large-scale structure in the universe. Over the past decade several measurements of weak lensing by galaxy clusters have been made. Mass reconstruction techniques are now being applied to wide field lensing surveys in blank fields that will probe the dark matter distribution over angular scales of order $`1^{}1^{}`$. Wide field lensing observations have already detected filaments and dark halos that were not visible by their light distribution (Kaiser at al 1998; Erben et al 1999; Tyson et al. 1999).

Statistical properties of the clustering of dark matter can be probed from lensing data by computing shear correlations over blank fields with area of order 10 square degrees (Blandford et al 1991; Miralda-Escudé 1991; Kaiser 1992; Bernardeau et al 1997; Jain & Seljak 1997; Kaiser 1998; Stebbins 1996; Schneider et al. 1998). An alternative approach is to focus on the statistics of dark matter halos, identified through their lensing strength, using measures such as the aperture mass (Schneider 1996; Kruse & Schneider 1999a; Kruse & Schneider 1999a; Reblinsky et al. 1999). The halo statistics approach has been shown by the above authors to be a useful probe of the mass function for massive, cluster sized halos; the main practical limitation is that only $`10`$ halos per square degree are expected to be detected with adequate signal-to-noise.

This paper advocates a new approach to the measurement of the statistics of dark matter halos through lensing. By modeling the distribution of peaks in lensing data induced by the noise due to the intrinsic ellipticities of source galaxies, we show that it is possible to statistically detect the signal due to dark matter halos, even for mass scales below the signal-to-noise limit for the detection of individual halos. Section 2 describes the construction of peak statistics from simulated data and from pure noise. Results for the peak statistics for a set of cosmological models are shown in Section 3. We discuss the prospects for measuring the halo mass function and discriminating models from realistic data in Section 4.

## 2. Peak Statistics in Simulated Data

We use shear and convergence fields from ray tracing simulations through the dark matter distribution of N-body simulations (Jain, Seljak & White 1999). The fields we use are about 3 degrees on a side, sampled with a grid spacing of $`0.1^{}`$, with source galaxies taken to be at $`z=1`$. We use two cosmological models, an Einstein-de Sitter model and an open model with $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{matter}}=0.3`$. The power spectrum corresponds to a cold dark matter shape parameter $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0.21`$ model. Further details of the models and the simulations are given in Jain et al (1999).

A simulated noisy map of the convergence, $`\kappa (\stackrel{}{\theta })`$, is built by first smoothing the $`\kappa `$ field over scale $`\theta _G`$ with a Gaussian window $`W(\theta )=\mathrm{exp}(|\stackrel{}{\theta }|^2/\theta _G^2)/\pi \theta _G^2`$. The noise due to the randomly oriented intrinsic ellipticities of source galaxies is modeled as a Gaussian random field with variance,

$$\sigma _{\mathrm{noise}}^2=\frac{\sigma _ϵ^2}{2}\frac{1}{2\pi \theta _G^2n_g},$$
(1)   
where $`\sigma _ϵ`$ is the rms amplitude of the intrinsic ellipticity distribution and $`n_g`$ is the number density of source galaxies. This Gaussian noise is added to the smoothed $`\kappa `$ field; the accuracy of this noise model is discussed below. From the smoothed noisy data, peaks are found by identifying pixels that have a higher/lower value of $`\kappa `$ than all neighboring pixels. This corresponds to the condition that the gradient of the field vanishes and thus includes peaks as well as troughs. The height of the peak $`\nu =\kappa /\sigma _{\mathrm{noise}}`$ is its value in units of the noise rms in the smoothed field.

Our choice of the noise model for the convergence field relies on previous work. Van Waerbeke et al (1999) have shown that the convergence field can be accurately reconstructed from observed ellipticity data in the absence of systematic errors. Both the reconstruction schemes of Kaiser & Squires (1993) and the Maximum-Likelihood algorithm of Bartelmann et al (1996) recover the convergence field with adequate accuracy for fields of order a degree on a side. Van Waerbeke (1999) further showed that the noise properties of peaks can be analytically described using Gaussian statistics (Bardeen et al 1986; Bond & Efstathiou 1987), and the weak lensing approximation.

Figure 1 shows a test of the analytical model of Van Waerbeke (1999) for peaks due to noise, and checks the accuracy of the peak distribution in the reconstructed $`\kappa `$. The dot-dashed curve shows the histogram of peaks from this analytical noise model; the double peaked shape is due to peaks with positive curvature and troughs with negative curvature. Almost overlapping with the analytical curve is the measured histograms of peaks in a field with pure noise. The distribution of peak heights measured in maps of $`\kappa `$ reconstructed from noisy ellipticity data (dashed line) is compared with the distribution in the $`\kappa `$ maps of the signal plus Gaussian noise with variance given by equation 1 (solid line). The close agreement of the two curves demonstrates the accuracy of the $`\kappa `$ reconstruction scheme.

The success of the reconstruction gives us confidence in working with the convergence data and the noise model directly, avoiding the slow and expensive reconstruction process. We have also verified that using the mass aperture statistic, which is constructed directly from ellipticity data, leads to very similar peak distributions. We have also found that a variety of distributions of the intrinsic ellipticity (including non-Gaussian ditributions) produce the same Gaussian statistics for peaks in the $`\kappa `$ maps; these results will be presented elsewhere. Figure 2 shows the actual maps of the convergence, $`\kappa `$, used to measure the peak distributions. The small amplitude peaks in the signal map are swamped by the noise, so there is little hope of recovering them individually from data. However, we show below that their distribution is sufficiently modulated by the signal to distinguish cosmological models.

## 3. Sensitivity of Peak Statistics to $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$

Figure 3 shows the probability distribution function (pdf) of peaks in the convergence field as a function of peak height for noise-free (left panels) and noisy (right panels) fields for two different smoothing scales. The pdf in noise-free fields has the qualitative characteristics due to nonlinear gravitational clustering: at negative peak heights (underdense regions) it has a cutoff related to the minimum $`\kappa `$ resulting from empty beams, and it has a tail at positive $`\nu `$ due to collapsed halos. The cosmological models have different pdf’s, just as they do for the pdf of $`\kappa `$ in the field, shown in figure 4. For the noisy fields, the number density of source galaxies is 30 per square arcminute, and their rms intrinsic ellipticity is $`\sigma _ϵ=0.2`$. Thus the peak height $`\nu =1`$ corresponds to an averaged value of $`\kappa =0.02(0.01)`$ over the smoothing radius for the upper (lower) panels of figure 3.

The right panels of figure 3 show that in the presence of noise, the pdf’s look quite different from the noise-free case. However the noisy pdf’s still have different shapes from the pure noise pdf’s and the cosmological models remain distinguishable. The asymmetric double peak for the low amplitude peaks ($`2<\nu <2`$) arises due to the noise maxima and minima, but it is suppressed relative to the pure noise case and is asymmetric due to the gravitational shear. The open and Einstein-de Sitter models are easily distinguishable for these low amplitude peaks, even though almost none of the peaks can be individually associated with dark matter halos. The relative number of very negative troughs (which are mostly noise troughs modulated by the fact that they are located in large voids) can by itself be used to discriminate models with different values of $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, as noted by Jain et al (1999) for the field pdf. As the smoothing scale is increased from $`0.5^{}`$ to $`1^{}`$, the signal dominates over the shape of the noise pdf, but sample variance becomes larger as there are fewer peaks. As a result, at both smoothing scales, the models can be distinguished at about the same level of significance. The error bars in the right panels are not much larger than in the pdf from the noise-free maps. The addition of ellipticity noise broadens the peak distribution, but the error bars are still dominated by sample variance in the signal. Similary, the primary effect of increasing $`\sigma _ϵ`$ is to broaden the pdf while not changing the error bars by much.

It is worth noting that previous theoretical work on halo detection has focused on the peaks that can be individually detected with adequate signal to noise. These would correspond to the parts of the pdf with $`\nu \stackrel{>}{}45`$, where sample variance is large. Clearly the bulk of the information on the mass function and in distinguishing models is at smaller or negative peak heights and can be used only statistically by modeling the noise pdf.

## 4. Discussion

The results presented in sections 2 and 3 show that the peak distribution from lensing data has information on the projected mass function of dark matter halos, and is sensitive to the cosmological model. The level of non-Gaussianity of the pdf is a powerful discrimant of models with different values of $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$. Figure 3 shows that the models can be distinguished from the pdf over a wide range of peak heights at 2 to 3-$`\sigma `$; by combining information at different peak heights and smoothing scales we can obtain much higher significance. Further, the third and fourth moments of the peak distribution for different smoothing scales are sensitive to the cosmological model, as expected qualitatively from the shapes of the distribution. We have also compared the peak distributions shown with a model with non-zero cosmological constant $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{\Lambda }=0.7`$. The peak distribution in the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-model lies in-between the Einstein de-Sitter and open model with the same value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{matter}}`$.

Beyond the dependence on the cosmological parameters, the peak pdf contains information on the projected mass function over all mass scales. It is important to test how accurately we can recover the pdf of peaks due to the lensing signal, and hence the projected mass function, from wide field lensing surveys. A straightforward approach is to compare the measured pdf with the predictions of a set of models that include the level of noise observed in the data. The best fit model can be found by minimizing the $`\chi ^2`$. We demonstrate in a forthcoming paper that the projected mass function and $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ can be simultaneously determined by using the normalization and shape of the distribution (Van Waerbeke & Jain 1999). Since we use information from all peak heights, not just the high-$`\sigma `$ peaks that can be detected individually, the mass function is constrained over mass scales ranging from galactic to cluster sized halos. A more ambitious approach to recover the lensing signal would be to de-convolve the measured peak distribution using the analytical model for the noise. The nearly perfect accuracy of the analytical noise model (see figure 1), which we have checked for four cosmological models with different smoothing scales and noise distribution, gives us confidence that the lensing signal can be extracted from forthcoming data — either using deconvolution, or by comparing the forward convolution for a set of models.

Analytical predictions of peak statistics would be valuable in comparing theoretical predictions with observations. Reblinski et al (1999) have shown that predictions of peak number densities based on the Press-Schechter model agree with the simulations for the high-$`\sigma `$ peaks. Detailed analytical predictions of peak number densities and their angular correlations by combining the Press-Schechter model and its extensions with our noise model would be useful. Further work is also needed to test the sensitivity of the results to the shape of the dark matter power spectrum. The dependence on the redshift distribution of source galaxies needs to be computed as well — since the level of non-Gaussianity decreases for more distant galaxies, increasing the redshift of source galaxies could mimic the effect of high-$`\mathrm{\Omega }`$.

To place the peaks approach in perspective, it is useful to compare it with the standard approach of measuring dark matter statistics using the entire field (without peak identification). The peak statistics rely on only a subset of the available information (the location and height of peaks, and eventually their profile), and obtaining cosmological information from them requires additional theoretical modeling compared to field statistics. On the other hand, the use of peak statistics has both practical and theoretical advantages. Peak statistics are likely to be robust to certain kinds of systematics — small, unknown errors in the galaxy ellipticities that complicate the use of field statistics. For example, in practice, the shear measured from ellipticity data is multiplied by a factor larger than unity to account for the smearing by the point spread function. If this factor is estimated incorrectly, it could change the height but probably not the location of the peaks. It would then amount to a rescaling of the x-axis in the peak histograms, which does not change the comparisons amongst the cosmological models.

On the theoretical side, peak statistics can provide insights into the biasing of galaxies relative to the dark matter, by allowing us to consider the two distinct components of biasing: first, the relation of galaxies to dark halos, and second, of halos to the dark matter. By combining the measured clustering of galaxies with that of dark halos measured through peak statistics from lensing data, the first step in the biasing of galaxies can be directly probed. For the second step of relating halos to the dark matter, we will need to use successful measurements of field lensing, or to interpret the data using theoretical models for the relation of halos to the dark matter.

We have shown that the statistics of peaks provides a useful new approach to wide field lensing. It is complementary to the standard statistics such as ellipticity correlations over the field, and is directly linked to the projected distribution of dark matter halos. The characteristic non-Gaussian shape of the peak distribution (its asymmetric double peaked shape) makes it a powerful probe of the cosmological model as well as a useful test of the presence of systematics errors.

We are grateful to Uros Seljak, Peter Schneider, Ravi Sheth, Alex Szalay and Simon White for helpful discussions. We thank an anonymous referee for comments.