Environmental effects on halo abundance and weak lensing peak statistics towards large underdense regions

Abstract

ABSTRACT The cosmic microwave background (CMB) contains an anomalous cold spot with a surrounding hot ring, known as the Cold Spot. Inoue & Silk proposed that this feature could be explained by postulating a supervoid: if such a large underdense region exists, then the growth of matter perturbing around the spot might differ from the average value in the Universe and the differences might affect weak lensing analysis of peak statistics. To investigate environmental effects on halo number count and peak statistics, we used a publicly available ray-tracing simulation for a box size of 2250 h−1 Mpc on a side. We found that the number count for massive haloes towards the largest underdense region in the simulation decreases and the corresponding significance of the difference, based on a cosmic average, is ≥3σ. On the basis of the results of peak statistics analysis, the number of high peaks decreases with the decrement of massive haloes, but the number of low peaks increases with the lack of matter in the line of sight. The highest significance of the decrement in peak counts in large underdense regions is 5σ in the total signal-to-noise ratio. Our result implies that environmental effects on halo abundance and weak lensing peak statistic can be used to probe the presence and properties of supervoids.