Weak-lensing Mass Reconstruction of Galaxy Clusters with Convolutional Neural Network

Authors: Sungwook E. Hong, Sangnam Park, M. James Jee, Dongsu Bak, Sangjun Cha

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

We introduce a novel method for reconstructing the projected matter distributions of galaxy clusters with weak-lensing (WL) data based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Training datasets are generated with ray-tracing through cosmological simulations. We control the noise level of the galaxy shear catalog such that it mimics the typical properties of the existing ground-based WL observations of galaxy clusters. We find that the mass reconstruction by our multi-layered CNN with the architecture of alternating convolution and trans-convolution filters significantly outperforms the traditional reconstruction methods. The CNN method provides better pixel-to-pixel correlations with the truth, restores more accurate positions of the mass peaks, and more efficiently suppresses artifacts near the field edges. In addition, the CNN mass reconstruction lifts the mass-sheet degeneracy when applied to sufficiently large fields. This implies that this CNN algorithm can be used to measure cluster masses in a model independent way for future wide-field WL surveys.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.05403