Cosmological constraints from HSC Y1 lensing convergence PDF

Abstract: We utilize the probability distribution function (PDF) of normalized convergence maps reconstructed from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Y1 shear catalogue, in combination with the power spectrum, to measure the matter clustering amplitude $S_8=\sigma_8\sqrt{\Omega_m/0.3}$. The large-scale structure's statistical properties are incompletely described by the traditional two-point statistics, motivating our investigation of the PDF -- a complementary higher-order statistic. By defining the PDF over the standard deviation-normalized convergence map we are able to isolate the non-Gaussian information. We use tailored simulations to compress the data vector and construct a likelihood approximation. We mitigate the impact of survey and astrophysical systematics with cuts on smoothing scales, redshift bins, and data vectors. We find $S_8=0.860^{+0.066}_{-0.109}$ from the PDF alone and $S_8=0.798^{+0.029}_{-0.042}$ from the combination of PDF and power spectrum (68% CL). The PDF improves the power spectrum-only constraint by about 10%.