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arXiv · 2609.24948

Two-dimensional weak lensing shear for cluster mass, concentration, ellipticity and miscentering estimation

Calum Murray·Martin Kilbinger·Constantin Payerne
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Abstract

The effects of weak gravitational lensing induced by clusters of galaxies makes it possible to constrain their dark matter distribution. In general mass estimates from weak lensing are made by compressing the two-dimensional shear-field into one-dimension. In this work we build a forward model of the two-dimensional reduced-shear field around a galaxy cluster, including the non-Gaussian correlated large-scale structure from N-body simulations, the uncorrelated line-of-sight structure, cluster miscentering and ellipticity. We then use simulation-based inference to obtain posteriors on the cluster mass, concentration, miscentering and ellipticity from the full field. The two-dimensional approach leads to improvements on cluster mass constraints by up to 20\%. We show that this is due to a better treatment of the spatially correlated noise across the shear field. There is also significant improvements on the cluster concentration and miscentering. Whilst improvements are also made to the estimation of cluster ellipticity, the constraints are still prior dependent for these individual cluster constraints. We also quantify the impact of the line-of-sight structure on the constraints. Neglecting it underestimates the mass uncertainty by up to a factor of $2$ for the most massive clusters.

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Calum Murray, Martin Kilbinger, Constantin Payerne. 2026-09-21. Two-dimensional weak lensing shear for cluster mass, concentration, ellipticity and miscentering estimation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24948

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