Cosmology with the cluster mass function: mass estimators and shape systematics in large weak lensing surveys

TL;DR

This paper investigates how triaxial dark matter halo shapes affect weak lensing mass estimates and demonstrates that careful averaging and estimator choice can mitigate biases, enabling unbiased cosmological constraints from large cluster surveys.

Contribution

It shows that triaxiality biases in mass estimates can be reduced with optimal estimators and sufficient averaging, improving the accuracy of cosmological inferences from weak lensing surveys.

Findings

Triaxiality can bias mass estimates by a few percent if not properly accounted for.

A sufficient number of halos in each bin can average out shape effects.

Careful estimator selection effectively removes bias in mass function measurements.

Abstract

Accurate measurement of the cluster mass function is a crucial element in efforts to constrain structure formation models, the normalisation of the matter power spectrum and the cosmological matter density, and the nature and evolution of dark energy. Large weak lensing surveys of ~20,000 galaxy clusters and groups will be key tools in the observational pursuit of that goal. These weak lensing studies often proceed by stacking the lensing signals of many clusters and groups binned by mass-correlated observables such as richness and luminosity; typically such analyses ignore the triaxial structure of dark matter halos on the assumption that the averaging of many shear signals within each mass bin makes its effects (as large as factors of two in mass model parameter estimates from individual clusters) negligible. We test this assumption and find that triaxiality can bias 3D virial mass estimates compared to those for a spherical population by a few percent if suboptimal mass estimators are used. This bias affects not only direct lensing constraints on the mass function but can also affect the scatter and normalization of the mass-observable relations derived from lensing that are so crucial to constraining the cluster mass function with large samples. However, we demonstrate that a careful choice of mass estimator can remove the bias very effectively if the lensing signals from a sufficient number of triaxial halos are averaged together, and further quantify that sufficient number for adequate shape averaging. We thus show that by choosing observable bins to contain an adequate number of halos and by utilizing a carefully chosen 3D mass estimator stacked weak-lensing analyses can give unbiased constraints on the triaxial mass function.