Ray-tracing vs. Born approximation in full-sky weak lensing simulations of the MillenniumTNG project

TL;DR

This study compares the Born approximation and full ray-tracing in weak lensing simulations, finding small differences at the power spectrum level but notable effects in higher-order statistics, emphasizing the need for full ray-tracing for precision cosmology.

Contribution

The paper introduces a full-sky ray-tracing scheme applied to MillenniumTNG simulations and assesses its impact on weak lensing statistics compared to the Born approximation.

Findings

Small differences in power spectrum between methods

Higher-order statistics show more significant effects

Interpolation methods affect the accuracy of ray-tracing results

Abstract

Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for precision tests of cosmology. As the expected deflection angles are small, predictions based on non-linear N-body simulations are commonly computed with the Born approximation. Here we examine this assumption using ${\small DORIAN}$, a newly developed full-sky ray-tracing scheme applied to high-resolution mass-shell outputs of the two largest simulations in the MillenniumTNG suite, each with a 3000 Mpc box containing almost 1.1 trillion cold dark matter particles in addition to 16.7 billion particles representing massive neutrinos. We examine simple two-point statistics like the angular power spectrum of the convergence field, as well as statistics sensitive to higher order correlations such as peak and minimum statistics, void statistics, and Minkowski functionals of the convergence maps. Overall, we find only small differences between the Born approximation and a full ray-tracing treatment. While these are negligibly small at power-spectrum level, some higher order statistics show more sizable effects; ray-tracing is necessary to achieve percent level precision. At the resolution reached here, full-sky maps with 0.8 billion pixels and an angular resolution of 0.43 arcmin, we find that interpolation accuracy can introduce appreciable errors in ray-tracing results. We therefore implemented an interpolation method based on nonuniform fast Fourier transforms (NUFFT) along with more traditional methods. Bilinear interpolation introduces significant smoothing, while nearest grid point sampling agrees well with NUFFT, at least for our fiducial source redshift, $z_s=1.0$, and for the 1 arcmin smoothing we use for higher-order statistics.