On the cosmology dependence of the cluster weak-lensing mass bias

TL;DR

This study investigates how cosmological parameters influence the systematic bias in weak-lensing mass estimates of galaxy clusters, emphasizing the importance of modeling baryonic effects for precise cosmological measurements.

Contribution

It demonstrates the dependence of weak-lensing mass bias on cosmology and baryonic physics, proposing that incorporating cosmology-dependent concentration models can mitigate bias variations.

Findings

Mass bias varies with cosmology by up to 0.030 in ln scale.

Assuming a fixed concentration-mass relation introduces cosmology-dependent bias.

Modeling concentration with cosmology dependence stabilizes the mass bias.

Abstract

Measurements of the shear induced by weak gravitational lensing around galaxy cluster lines of sight are the gold standard for calibrating cluster observable-mass relations, thereby enabling a robust and precise inference of cosmological parameters. The weak-lensing mass bias is the systematic offset between the true halo mass and the mass that is inferred from the lensing data using an imperfect model for the halo mass distribution. We study the impact of cosmology on the lensing mass bias to inform future cosmological analyses of galaxy clusters. We create synthetic lensing shear maps for 115,920 projections of clusters with $M_{200\mathrm c}>1.56\times10^{14}\,h^{-1}M_\odot$ in a suite of Magneticum simulations. The simulation boxes are $896\,h^{-1}$Mpc on a side and are set up with 15 different combinations of the cosmological parameters $\Omega_\mathrm{m}$, $\Omega_\mathrm{b}$, $\sigma_8$, and $H_0$. Assuming a Navarro-Frenk-White profile, we extract weak-lensing mass measurements and quantify their bias $b_\mathrm{WL}$ with respect to the true halo mass. To investigate the impact of baryonic effects, we perform the analysis on gravity-only simulations and on their full-physics hydrodynamical counterparts. We confirm that assuming a fixed halo concentration or a fixed concentration-mass relation leads to cosmology-dependent changes of the mass bias. We report changes of up to $\Delta\ln b_\mathrm{WL}=0.030$ with respect to the bias obtained at the fiducial WMAP7 cosmology. Adopting a model for the concentration that also depends on cosmology absorbs the changes in halo profiles and we recover essentially constant values for the mass bias. Our analysis of hydrodynamical simulations suggests that future, more accurate models will also need to explicitly account for the strength of baryonic effects.