Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>We performed a series of numerical experiments to quantify the sensitivity of the predictions for weak lensing statistics obtained in ray-tracing dark matter (DM)-only simulations, to two hyper-parameters that influence the accuracy as well as the computational cost of the predictions: the thickness of the lens planes used to build past light cones and the mass resolution of the underlying DM simulation. The statistics considered are the power spectrum (PS) and a series of non-Gaussian observables, including the one-point probability density function, lensing peaks, and Minkowski functionals. Counterintuitively, we find that using thin lens planes (< 60 <jats:italic>h</jats:italic>
<jats:sup>−1</jats:sup> Mpc on a 240 <jats:italic>h</jats:italic>
<jats:sup>−1</jats:sup> Mpc simulation box) suppresses the PS over a broad range of scales beyond what would be acceptable for a survey comparable to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A mass resolution of 7.2 × 10<jats:sup>11</jats:sup>
<jats:italic>h</jats:italic>
<jats:sup>−1</jats:sup>
<jats:italic>M</jats:italic>
<jats:sub>⊙</jats:sub> per DM particle (or 256<jats:sup>3</jats:sup> particles in a (240 <jats:italic>h</jats:italic>
<jats:sup>−1</jats:sup> Mpc)<jats:sup>3</jats:sup> box) is sufficient to extract information using the PS and non-Gaussian statistics from weak lensing data at angular scales down to 1′ with LSST-like levels of shape noise.</jats:p>