Accurate Galaxy Cluster Shear and Mass Calibration for LSST with AnaCal
Conghao Zhou, Xiangchong Li, Hao-Yi Wu, Anja von der Linden, Tesla Jeltema, Tae-hyeon Shin, Simon Birrer, Tomomi Sunayama, Shenming Fu, Prakruth Adari, Lucie Baumont, Surhud More, Anthony Englert, Miranda Gorsuch, Andrés A. Plazas Malagón
astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.IM
Submitted: 2026-06-19
Comments: 16 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ApJ
Code: https://github.com/mr-superonion/xlens
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: The observed abundance of galaxy clusters as a function of mass and redshift provides a powerful route to precision cosmology; a key challenge for cluster cosmology is to establish the relation
Terminology
Abstract
The observed abundance of galaxy clusters as a function of mass and redshift provides a powerful route to precision cosmology; a key challenge for cluster cosmology is to establish the relation between cluster observables and cluster masses, for which cluster weak gravitational lensing has become the standard tool. A key challenge for cluster lensing is that the shear signal near cluster centers can reach the non-linear regime, where many shear estimators rely on perturbative assumptions that must be explicitly validated. In this work, we use image simulations to test the performance of the shear estimator AnaCal for cluster weak lensing under conditions representative of the 10-year LSST data. We find that AnaCal recovers the input shear with minimal bias even at mildly high shear, g about 0.15. We discover a radially decreasing mean shear response as seen previously in data, driven by the radial dependence of the convergence field; if unmodeled, this effect can bias shear inference. We also find a positive shear-estimation bias at third order in the reduced shear near the cluster center. However, because only a small fraction of galaxies lie in the high-shear regime and those measurements are further downweighted by the covariance matrix, the resulting mean cluster-mass bias for cluster lens masses in [10 14 M, 10 15 M] -- adopting a scale cut of about 0.2 Mpc at z=0.25 -- is 0.24 plus or minus 0.26% under ideal settings. These results demonstrate that AnaCal is a robust tool for accurate cluster mass calibration in the LSST era.
Sources
- The Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the Low Surface Brightness Universe
- The SRG/eROSITA All-Sky Survey: Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Weak Gravitational Lensing by eRASS1 selected Galaxy Clusters
- Metacalibration: Direct Self-Calibration of Biases in Shear Measurement
- Cross-correlation Weak Lensing of SDSS galaxy Clusters II: Cluster Density Profiles and the Mass--Richness Relation
- Analytical weak-lensing shear response of galaxy model fitting
- Analytical Noise Bias Correction for Precise Weak Lensing Shear Inference
- Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Clusters are Consistent with Planck
- Cosmological Constraints from Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Cluster Lensing and Abundances with Simulation-based Forward-Modeling
- Weak Lensing Mass Calibration of the ACT DR5 Galaxy Clusters with the DES Year 3 Weak Lensing Data
- The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) Science Requirements Document
- Cluster Cosmology Without Cluster Finding
Related papers
- Angular clustering and bias of photometric quasars in the Kilo-Degree Survey Data Release 4
- A Novel kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Estimator for Electron-Electron Correlations
- Magnetic fields at the dawn of structure formation I. The CARLA J1510+5958 proto-cluster
- Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Weak Lensing and Galaxy Clustering Cosmological Analysis Framework
- Exploring the Impact of Systematic Bias in Type Ia Supernova Cosmology Across Diverse Dark Energy Parametrizations
- Non-Gaussian Galaxy Stochasticity and the Noise-Field Formulation