Baryonic effects for weak lensing. Part I. Power spectrum and covariance matrix

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of baryonic feedback on weak lensing power spectra, demonstrating that neglecting these effects causes significant biases in cosmological parameters, and proposes methods to incorporate baryonic uncertainties for accurate inference.

Contribution

The study develops an emulator for baryonic power suppression and assesses its effects on cosmological parameter estimation in weak lensing surveys.

Findings

Ignoring baryonic effects biases parameters by over 5σ.

Restricting to large scales reduces bias but increases uncertainty.

Neglecting baryonic effects in covariance has minimal impact.

Abstract

Baryonic feedback effects lead to a suppression of the weak lensing angular power spectrum on small scales. The poorly constrained shape and amplitude of this suppression is an important source of uncertainties for upcoming cosmological weak lensing surveys such as Euclid or LSST. In this first paper in a series of two, we use simulations to build a Euclid-like tomographic mock data-set for the cosmic shear power spectrum and the corresponding covariance matrix, which are both corrected for baryonic effects following the baryonification method of Schneider et al. (2019). In addition, we develop an emulator to obtain fast predictions of the baryonic power suppression, allowing us to perform a likelihood inference analysis for a standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology with both cosmological and astrophysical parameters. Our main findings are the following: (i) ignoring baryonic effects leads to a greater than 5$\sigma$ bias on the cosmological parameters $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$; (ii) restricting the analysis to the largest scales, that are mostly unaffected by baryons, makes the bias disappear, but results in a blow-up of the $\Omega_m$-$\sigma_8$ contour area by more than a factor of 10; (iii) ignoring baryonic effects on the covariance matrix does not significantly affect cosmological parameter estimates; (iv) while the baryonic suppression is mildly cosmology dependent, this effect does not noticeably modify the posterior contours. Overall, we conclude that including baryonic uncertainties in terms of nuisance parameters results in unbiased and surprisingly tight constraints on cosmology.