Weak Lensing Mass Calibration of the ACT DR5 Galaxy Clusters with the DES Year 3 Weak Lensing Data

arXiv:2512.18935 · astro-ph.CO · Submitted 2025-12-22 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.CO

Submitted: 2025-12-22

Updated: 2026-09-16

Comments: 36 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables, published in JCAP

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We use weak gravitational lensing measurements from Year 3 Dark Energy Survey data to calibrate the masses of 443 galaxy clusters selected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect from Atacama Cosmology

Terminology

Abstract

We use weak gravitational lensing measurements from Year 3 Dark Energy Survey data to calibrate the masses of 443 galaxy clusters selected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect from Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 5 maps. We incorporate redshift and SZ measurements for individual clusters into a hierarchical model for the stacked lensing signals and perform Bayesian analyses to constrain hydrostatic mass bias of the clusters. Our treatment of systematic uncertainties includes a prescription for measuring and accounting for the weak lensing boost factor, consideration of a miscentering effect, as well as marginalization over uncertainties in the source galaxy photometric redshift distributions and shear calibration. The constraints on the normalization of the mass-observable relation have a precision of 7%, with the mean WL halo mass M 500c = 5.4 times 10 14 M. We measure the bias between the true cluster mass and the mass estimated from the SZ signal assuming hydrostatic equilibrium, to be 1-b = 0.74+0.06-0.05 over the full sample. When splitting the clusters into high and low redshift bins, we measure 1-b = 0.58+0.06-0.05 and 0.81+0.08-0.06, respectively. When introducing additional freedom in redshift and mass to the hydrostatic bias model, we find that 1-b decreases with redshift (with the power law of-1.8+0.5-0.6, 99.95% confidence), consistent with findings from other recent studies, while we do not find any significant trend in mass. We also demonstrate that our result is robust against various systematics such as a scale cut, priors on baryonic and miscentering parameters, and degree of scatter in mass-observable relation. The weak-lensing mass calibration presented in this study will be a useful tool for using the ACT clusters as probes of astrophysics, and as a step towards using their abundance as a cosmological probe.

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