Work

Mapping Dark Matter in Merging Clusters with Weak Lensing for CSST: Morphology and Filament Recovery

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Weak gravitational lensing offers a direct probe of the projected dark matter distribution in cluster-scale structures and the surrounding cosmic web. We investigate the capability of the China Space Station Telescope (CSST) to recover nonspherical dark matter morphologies using mock reduced-shear maps generated from cosmological N-body simulations. We apply the deep-learning-based MIU 2 Net mass-reconstruction framework to CSST-like wide- and deep-field source densities, focusing on two representative systems: filament-connected halo pairs and elongated halos. MIU 2 Net accurately recovers halo centers, elongated mass distributions, and the filamentary structures connecting halo pairs in both survey configurations. Halo centers are localized within about 0.1 h −1 Mpc, and elongated-halo shapes and orientations are reliably recovered. Filament paths are stable against shape noise, with mean normalized instability parameters I F , defined as the mean deviation from the true filament locus in units of R 200 , decreasing from 0.041–0.037 in the low-redshift bin and from 0.051–0.045 in the high-redshift bin from the wide to deep field. The recovered filament shapes remain consistent with the true maps at the percent level. Compared with conventional Kaiser–Squires reconstruction, MIU 2 Net better preserves low-contrast anisotropic structures while suppressing small-scale noise. These results demonstrate that CSST weak-lensing data, combined with machine-learning-based mass reconstruction, will enable statistical studies of cluster assembly, anisotropic matter accretion, and the connection between massive halos and the filamentary cosmic web.

Source: The Astrophysical Journal

DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aeb2fd