Clustering of the extreme: A theoretical description of weak lensing critical points power spectra in the mildly nonlinear regime

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework for understanding the clustering of weak lensing critical points, like peaks and voids, in the mildly nonlinear regime, providing new insights into cosmological structure formation.

Contribution

It derives the first analytical formulas for the power spectra and 2PCFs of 2D critical points in weak lensing fields, including nonlinear gravitational effects up to NNLO.

Findings

Derived power spectra up to NNLO including trispectrum configurations

Identified BAO features in lensing peak 2PCFs due to gradient constraints

Non-Gaussianity contributes about 10% at quasi-linear scales

Abstract

In cosmic web analysis, complementary to traditional cosmological probes, the extrema (e.g. peaks and voids) two-point correlation functions (2PCFs) are of particular interest for the study of both astrophysical phenomena and cosmological structure formation. However most previous studies constructed those statistics via N-body simulations without a robust theoretical derivation from first principles. A strong motivation exists for analytically describing the 2PCFs of these local extrema, taking into account the nonlinear gravitational evolution in the late Universe. In this paper, we derive analytical formulae for the power spectra and 2PCFs of 2D critical points, including peaks (maxima), voids (minima) and saddle points, in mildly non-Gaussian weak gravitational lensing fields. We apply a perturbative bias expansion to model the clustering of 2D critical points. We successfully derive the power spectrum of weak lensing critical points up to the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in gravitational perturbation theory, where trispectrum configurations of the weak lensing field have to be included. We numerically evaluate those power spectra up to the next-to-leading order (NLO), which correspond to the inclusion of bispectrum configurations, and transform them to the corresponding 2PCFs. An exact Monte Carlo (MC) integration is performed assuming a Gaussian distributed density field to validate our theoretical predictions. Overall, we find similar properties in 2D compared to the clustering of 3D critical points previously measured from N-body simulations. Contrary to standard lensing power spectra analysis, we find distinct BAO features in the lensing peak 2PCFs due to the gradient and curvature constraints, and we quantify that non-Gaussianity makes for ~10% of the signal at quasi-linear scales which could be important for current stage-IV surveys.