Towards an application of fourth-order shear statistics II: Efficient estimation of fourth-order shear correlation functions and an application to the DES Y3 data

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Main Authors: Porth, Lucas, Silvestre-Rosello, Elena, Schneider, Peter, Larma, Martina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Porth, Lucas
Silvestre-Rosello, Elena
Schneider, Peter
Larma, Martina
author_facet Porth, Lucas
Silvestre-Rosello, Elena
Schneider, Peter
Larma, Martina
contents Higher-order lensing statistics contain a wealth of cosmological information that is not captured by second-order statistics. Stage-III lensing surveys have sufficient statistical power to significantly detect cumulant-based statistics up to fourth order. We derive and validate an efficient estimation procedure for the four-point correlation function (4PCF) of polar fields such as weak lensing shear. We then use our approach to measure the shear 4PCF and the fourth-order aperture mass statistics in the DES Y3 survey. We construct an efficient estimator for fourth-order shear statistics which builds on the multipole decomposition of the shear 4PCF. We then validate our estimator on mock ellipticity catalogues obtained from Gaussian random fields and on realistic $N$-body simulations. Finally, we apply our estimator to the DES Y3 data and present a measurement of the fourth-order aperture statistics in a non-tomographic setup. Due to its quadratic scaling, our estimator provides a significant speed-up over hypothetical brute force or tree-based estimation methods of the shear 4PCF. We report a significant detection of the connected part of the fourth-order aperture mass in the DES Y3 data. We find the sampling distribution of the fourth-order aperture mass to be significantly skewed. We make our estimator code available on GitHub as part of the orpheus package.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07974
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards an application of fourth-order shear statistics II: Efficient estimation of fourth-order shear correlation functions and an application to the DES Y3 data
Porth, Lucas
Silvestre-Rosello, Elena
Schneider, Peter
Larma, Martina
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Higher-order lensing statistics contain a wealth of cosmological information that is not captured by second-order statistics. Stage-III lensing surveys have sufficient statistical power to significantly detect cumulant-based statistics up to fourth order. We derive and validate an efficient estimation procedure for the four-point correlation function (4PCF) of polar fields such as weak lensing shear. We then use our approach to measure the shear 4PCF and the fourth-order aperture mass statistics in the DES Y3 survey. We construct an efficient estimator for fourth-order shear statistics which builds on the multipole decomposition of the shear 4PCF. We then validate our estimator on mock ellipticity catalogues obtained from Gaussian random fields and on realistic $N$-body simulations. Finally, we apply our estimator to the DES Y3 data and present a measurement of the fourth-order aperture statistics in a non-tomographic setup. Due to its quadratic scaling, our estimator provides a significant speed-up over hypothetical brute force or tree-based estimation methods of the shear 4PCF. We report a significant detection of the connected part of the fourth-order aperture mass in the DES Y3 data. We find the sampling distribution of the fourth-order aperture mass to be significantly skewed. We make our estimator code available on GitHub as part of the orpheus package.
title Towards an application of fourth-order shear statistics II: Efficient estimation of fourth-order shear correlation functions and an application to the DES Y3 data
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07974