Cosmological constraining power of the redshifts, heights, and angular clustering of weak gravitational lensing peaks

Weak gravitational lensing (WL) peaks probe non-Gaussian information of the large-scale distribution of matter that is not captured by two-point lensing statistics. We study the cosmological potential of the height distribution, redshift distribution, and angular clustering of high-valued WL peaks using a Bayesian inference approach that mimics a Euclid analysis. We use a forthcoming dark-matter-only hypercube, which varies cosmology in a ten-dimensional space, including evolving dark energy, neutrino mass, decaying dark matter, and the running of the scalar spectral index. We find the individual WL peak statistics to be complementary, as the redshift distribution best constrains the matter density, m, and the dark energy equation-of-state parameters, w 0, and w a; the height distribution and angular clustering are most sensitive to the amplitude of the primordial power spectrum, (10 10A s); while combining the three statistics allows us to also probe the baryon density, b, and the Hubble parameter, h. A comparison to the shear two-point correlation function demonstrates that WL peaks alone outperform the commonly used statistics, while even tighter constraints are obtained when combining all. Considering the 2-dimensional m- (10 10A s) and w 0-w a parameter planes, we find that the redshift distribution outperforms the angular clustering and peak-height distributions. We study the impact of the smoothing scale and find that, typically, the smallest scales yield the best results and the figure of merit improves by a factor about2 when combining multiple scales.