Multi-scale weak lensing detection of galaxy clusters with source redshift tomography

TL;DR

This paper investigates how tomographic source redshift information can enhance weak lensing detection of galaxy clusters, finding that a single well-chosen redshift bin performs comparably to multiple bins, with limitations due to contamination and spurious detections.

Contribution

It introduces a $z_{s, ext{min}}$-cut tomographic technique and evaluates its effectiveness in increasing weak lensing cluster detections using mock data.

Findings

Single redshift bin with $z_{s, ext{min}}=0.4$ performs as well as multiple bins.

Contamination and photometric errors reduce tomographic gains.

Spurious detections across bins decrease detection purity.

Abstract

Recently, a number of methods have emerged to detect galaxy clusters solely through their weak lensing signal. Using the recently-introduced wavelet multi-scale detection method, we focus here on the potential for the use of tomographic information of the source galaxies to increase the number of weak lensing detections. We apply the $z_{s,\mathrm{min}}$-cut technique, consisting of the combination of weak lensing peak detections emerging from lensing maps obtained using different source redshift bins, to mock data sets of progressively increasing sophistication. The source redshift distribution is chosen to be $Euclid$-like, with a maximum depth of $z_{s,\mathrm{max}}=3$, and overlapping tomographic redshift bins are constructed by progressively increasing the minimum source redshift $z_{s,\mathrm{min}}$. Considering all possible detection combinations from one to four tomographic bins, we find that a single source redshift bin, with $z_{s,\mathrm{min}}=0.4$, performs as well as the combination of multiple redshift bins. By running detections on synthetic clusters of varying complexity -- from isolated Navarro Frenk White haloes to haloes embedded in and formed within N-body cosmological simulations, and considering both true and photometric source redshifts -- we show that while large-scale structure contamination and photometric redshift errors reduce the potential gains of the tomographic approach, the dominant limitation is the accumulation of spurious detections across redshift bins, leading to decreased purity at a fixed detection threshold.