• Accepted Paper

Nulling baryonic feedback in weak lensing surveys using cross-correlations with fast radio bursts

Calvin Leung, Josh Borrow, Kiyoshi W. Masui, Shion Andrew, Kai-Feng Chen, Joop Schaye, and Matthieu Schaller

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 4 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ms7q-gw8d

Abstract

Baryonic feedback is a leading contaminant in studying dark matter using cosmic shear. This has meant omitting much of the data during cosmological inference, or forward-modeling the spatial distribution of gas around dark matter halos using models for baryonic feedback, which introduces nuisance parameters and raises questions of potential model misspecification. We propose a novel method of "baryon nulling" using cross-correlations between shear maps and fast radio burst (FRB) dispersion measures. We use the FLAMINGO suite of hydrodynamical simulations, whose power spectra span a wide yet realistic range of feedback variations, to demonstrate that our nulling procedures reduces sensitivity to feedback at k1 Mpc1 by a factor of a few, offering a valuable model-independent alternative to standard forward modeling procedures, which often assume a family of feedback models. Sensitive FRB surveys such as CHORD and the DSA-2000, and wide area surveys like Rubin, Roman, and Euclid, may enable the megaparsec-scale clustering of dark matter to be precisely constrained without a baryonic prior.

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