Enhancing cosmic shear with the multiscale lensing probability density function

ABSTRACT We quantify the cosmological constraining power of ‘lensing probability density function (PDF)’ – one-point weak lensing convergence maps by modelling this statistic numerically with an emulator trained on w cold dark matter cosmic shear simulations. After validating our methods Gaussian and lognormal fields, we show that ‘multiscale’ PDFs measured from multiple levels smoothing offer considerable gains over two-point statistics, owing to their ability extract non-Gaussian information: For a mock Stage-III survey, yield 33 per cent tighter constraints clustering parameter $S_8=\sigma _8\sqrt{\Omega _{\rm m}/0.3}$ than correlation functions. Stage-IV surveys, achieve >90 S8, but also Hubble energy equation-of-state parameters. Interestingly, find improvements when combining these two probes only in set-up; scenario contain all information standard statistics more. This suggests while are currently complementary, lower noise upcoming surveys will unleash PDF.