The impact of baryons on cosmological inference from weak lensing statistics

As weak lensing surveys are becoming deeper and cover larger areas, information will be available on small angular scales down to the arcmin level. To extract this extra information, accurate modelling of baryonic effects is necessary. In this work, we adopt a baryonic correction model, which includes gas both bound inside and ejected from dark matter (DM) haloes, a central galaxy, and changes in the DM profile induced by baryons. We use this model to incorporate baryons into a large suite of DM-only N-body simulations, covering a grid of 75 cosmologies in the Omega(m)-sigma(8) parameter space. We investigate how baryons affect Gaussian and non-Gaussian weak lensing statistics and the cosmological parameter inferences from these statistics. Our results show that marginalizing over baryonic parameters degrades the constraints in Omega(m)-sigma(8) space by a factor of 2-5 compared to those with baryonic parameters fixed. We also find that combining the lensing power spectrum and peak counts can break the degeneracy between cosmological and baryonic parameters and mitigate the impact of the uncertainty in baryonic physics.

Automated summary

As weak lensing surveys become deeper and cover larger areas, extracting additional information requires accurate modeling of baryonic effects. Marginalizing over baryonic parameters degrades constraints in the Omega(m)-sigma(8) space by a factor of 2-5 compared to fixed parameters, while combining lensing power spectrum and peak counts can break degeneracies between cosmological and baryonic parameters.