Detection of stacked filament lensing between SDSS luminous red galaxies

Abstract

We search for the lensing signal of massive filaments between 135 000 pairs of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We develop a new estimator that cleanly removes the much larger shear signal of the neighbouring LRG haloes, relying only on the assumption of spherical symmetry. We consider two models: a 'thick'-filament model constructed from ray-tracing simulations for Λ cold dark matter model, and a 'thin'-filament model which models the filament by a string of haloes along the line connecting the two LRGs.We show that the filament lensing signal is in nice agreement with the thick simulation filament, while strongly disfavouring the thin model. The magnitude of the lensing shear due to the filament is below 10-4. Employing the likelihood ratio test, we find a 4.5σ significance for the detection of the filament lensing signal, corresponding to a null hypothesis fluctuation probability of 3 × 10-6. We also carried out several null tests to verify that the residual shear signal from neighbouring LRGs and other shear systematics are minimized.