Lensing counter narrative: An effective description of small-scale clustering in weak lensing power spectra
Phys. Rev. D 114, 043522 – Published 13 August, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/v932-b6rl
Abstract
We present a new formalism to separate large- and small-scale contributions to cosmic shear through lensing counterterms (LCTs) inspired by effective field theory (EFT). Marginalizing over these LCTs isolates the large-scale cosmological signal in weak lensing power spectra while simultaneously constraining the impact of baryonic feedback or new physics (e.g., axion dark matter) at small scales. Our formalism removes the need for hard scale cuts in standard analyses, even when theoretical predictions are limited to below a physical cutoff , resulting in significant improvements in constraining power—more than smaller in the case of an legacy survey of space and time-Y10-like analysis without marginalizing over baryons when the analysis cutoff is set to . We conduct a proof-of-principle analysis on the publicly available Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data, finding and for analyses with cutoffs of and , respectively, with no detection of modifications to small-scale clustering at beyond the predictions of collisionless dark matter in a cold dark matter universe. We make our jax-based pipeline, gholax, integrated with intrinsic alignment predictions from the EFT of large-scale structure at 1-loop, publicly available.