Towards 1% accurate galaxy cluster masses: including baryons in weak-lensing mass inference

Abstract

Galaxy clusters are a promising probe of late-time structure growth, but constraints on cosmology from cluster abundances are currently limited by systematics in their inferred masses. One unmitigated systematic effect in weak-lensing mass inference is ignoring the presence of baryons and treating the entire cluster as a dark matter halo. In this work we present a new flexible model for cluster densities that captures both the baryonic and dark matter profiles, a new general technique for calculating the lensing signal of an arbitrary density profile, and a methodology for stacking those lensing signal to appropriately model stacked weak-lensing measurements of galaxy cluster catalogues. We test this model on 1400 simulated clusters. Similarly to previous studies, we find that a dark matter-only model overestimates the average mass by 7.5%, but including our baryonic term reduces that to 0.7%. Since two more variables are marginalized over when we include our baryonic term the posteriors on the cluster mass calibration are larger than the dark matter-only model. Additionally, to mitigate the computational complexity of our model, we construct an emulator (surrogate model) which accurately interpolates our model for parameter inference, while being much faster to use than the raw model. We also provide an open-source software framework for our model and emulator, called maszcal, which will serve as a platform for continued efforts to improve these mass-calibration techniques. In this work, we detail our model, the construction of the emulator, and the tests which we used to validate that our model does mitigate bias. Lastly, we describe tests of the emulator's accuracy.