KaRMMa – kappa reconstruction for mass mapping

ABSTRACT We present KaRMMa, a novel method for performing mass map reconstruction from weak-lensing surveys. We employ a fully Bayesian approach with a physically motivated lognormal prior to sample from the posterior distribution of convergence maps. We test KaRMMa on a suite of dark matter N-body simulations with simulated DES Y1-like shear observations. We show that KaRMMa outperforms the basic Kaiser–Squires mass map reconstruction in two key ways: (1) our best map point estimate has lower residuals compared to Kaiser–Squires; and (2) unlike the Kaiser–Squires reconstruction, the posterior distribution of KaRMMa maps is nearly unbiased in all summary statistics we considered, namely: one-point and two-point functions, and peak/void counts. In particular, KaRMMa successfully captures the non-Gaussian nature of the distribution of κ values in the simulated maps. We further demonstrate that the KaRMMa posteriors correctly characterize the uncertainty in all summary statistics we considered.