The non-zero mass of neutrinos suppresses the growth of cosmic structure on small scales. Since the level of suppression depends on the sum of the masses of the three active neutrino species, the evolution of large-scale structure is a promising tool to constrain the total mass of neutrinos and possibly shed light on the mass hierarchy. In this work, we investigate these effects via a large suite of N -body simulations that include massive neutrinos using an analytic linear-response approximation: the Cosmological Massive Neutrino Simulations (MassiveNuS). The simulations include the effects of radiation on the background expansion, as well as the clustering of neutrinos in response to the nonlinear dark matter evolution. We allow three cosmological parameters to vary: the neutrino mass sum M ν in the range of 0-0.6 eV, the total matter density Ω m , and the primordial power spectrum amplitude A s . The rms density fluctuation in spheres of 8 comoving Mpc/h (σ 8 ) is a derived parameter as a result. Our data products include N -body snapshots, halo catalogues, merger trees, raytraced galaxy lensing convergence maps for four source redshift planes between z s =1-2.5, and ray-traced cosmic microwave background lensing convergence maps. We describe the simulation procedures and code validation in this paper. The data are publicly available at

Lensing peaks have been proposed as a useful statistic, containing cosmological information from non-Gaussianities that is inaccessible from traditional two-point statistics such as the power spectrum or two-point correlation functions. Here we examine constraints on cosmological parameters from weak lensing peak counts, using the publicly available data from the 154 deg 2 CFHTLenS survey. We utilize a new suite of ray-tracing N-body simulations on a grid of 91 cosmological models, covering broad ranges of the three parameters Ωm, σ8, and w, and replicating the galaxy sky positions, redshifts, and shape noise in the CFHTLenS observations. We then build an emulator that interpolates the power spectrum and the peak counts to an accuracy of ≤ 5%, and compute the likelihood in the three-dimensional parameter space (Ωm, σ8, w) from both observables. We find that constraints from peak counts are comparable to those from the power spectrum, and somewhat tighter when different smoothing scales are combined. Neither observable can constrain w without external data. When the power spectrum and peak counts are combined, the area of the error "banana" in the (Ωm, σ8) plane reduces by a factor of ≈ two, compared to using the power spectrum alone. For a flat Λ cold dark matter model, combining both statistics, we obtain the constraint σ8(Ωm/0.27)

We compare the efficiency of moments and Minkowski functionals (MFs) in constraining the subset of cosmological parameters (Ωm, w, σ8) using simulated weak lensing convergence maps. We study an analytic perturbative expansion of the MFs ([1, 2]) in terms of the moments of the convergence field and of its spatial derivatives. We show that this perturbation series breaks down on smoothing scales below 5 ′ , while it shows a good degree of convergence on larger scales (∼ 15 ′ ). Most of the cosmological distinguishing power is lost when the maps are smoothed on these larger scales. We also show that, on scales comparable to 1 ′ , where the perturbation series does not converge, cosmological constraints obtained from the MFs are approximately 1.5-2 times better than the ones obtained from the first few moments of the convergence distribution -provided that the latter include spatial information, either from moments of gradients, or by combining multiple smoothing scales. Including either a set of these moments or the MFs can significantly tighten constraints on cosmological parameters, compared to the conventional method of using the power spectrum alone.

Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful cosmological probe, with non-Gaussian features potentially containing the majority of the information. We examine constraints on the parameter triplet (Ωm, w, σ8) from non-Gaussian features of the weak lensing convergence field, including a set of moments (up to 4 th order) and Minkowski functionals, using publicly available data from the 154 deg 2 CFHTLenS survey. We utilize a suite of ray-tracing N-body simulations spanning 91 points in (Ωm, w, σ8) parameter space, replicating the galaxy sky positions, redshifts and shape noise in the CFHTLenS catalogs. We then build an emulator that interpolates the simulated descriptors as a function of (Ωm, w, σ8), and use it to compute the likelihood function and parameter constraints. We employ a principal component analysis to reduce dimensionality and to help stabilize the constraints with respect to the number of bins used to construct each statistic. Using the full set of statistics, we find Σ8 ≡ σ8(Ωm/0.27) 0.55 = 0.75 ± 0.04 (68% C.L.), in agreement with previous values. We find that constraints on the (Ωm, σ8) doublet from the Minkowski functionals suffer a strong bias. However, high-order moments break the (Ωm, σ8) degeneracy and provide a tight constraint on these parameters with no apparent bias. The main contribution comes from quartic moments of derivatives.PACS numbers: 95.36.+x, 95.30.Sf, 98.62.Sb