Ray-tracing through the Millennium Simulation: Born corrections and lens-lens coupling in cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing

¹ Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85741 Garching, Germany
² Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Universität Bonn, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany e-mail: shilbert@astro.uni-bonn.de

Received: 29 September 2008
Accepted: 13 March 2009

Abstract

Context. Weak-lensing surveys need accurate theoretical predictions for interpretation of their results and cosmological-parameter estimation.

Aims. We study the accuracy of various approximations to cosmic shear and weak galaxy-galaxy lensing and investigate effects of Born corrections and lens-lens coupling.

Methods. We use ray-tracing through the Millennium Simulation, a large N-body simulation of cosmic structure formation, to calculate various cosmic-shear and galaxy-galaxy-lensing statistics. We compare the results from ray-tracing to semi-analytic predictions.

Results. (i) We confirm that the first-order approximation (i.e. neglecting lensing effects beyond first order in density fluctuations) provides an excellent fit to cosmic-shear power spectra as long as the actual matter power spectrum is used as input. Common fitting formulae, however, strongly underestimate the cosmic-shear power spectra (by on scales ). Halo models provide a better fit to cosmic shear-power spectra, but there are still noticeable deviations (). (ii) Cosmic-shear B-modes, which are induced by Born corrections and lens-lens coupling, are at least three orders of magnitude smaller than cosmic-shear E-modes. Semi-analytic extensions to the first-order approximation predict the right order of magnitude for the B-mode. Compared to the ray-tracing results, however, the semi-analytic predictions may differ by a factor two on small scales and also show a different scale dependence. (iii) The first-order approximation may under- or overestimate the galaxy-galaxy-lensing shear signal by several percent due to the neglect of magnification bias, which may lead to a correlation between the shear and the observed number density of lenses.

Conclusions. (i) Current semi-analytic models need to be improved in order to match the degree of statistical accuracy expected for future weak-lensing surveys. (ii) Shear B-modes induced by corrections to the first-order approximation are not important for future cosmic-shear surveys. (iii) Magnification bias can be important for galaxy-galaxy-lensing surveys.