Emulation of Cosmological Mass Maps with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Weak gravitational lensing mass maps play a crucial role in understanding the evolution of structures in the Universe and our ability to constrain cosmological models. The prediction of these mass maps is based on expensive N-body simulations, which can create a computational bottleneck for cosmological analyses. Simulation-based emulators of map summary statistics, such as the matter power spectrum and its covariance, are starting to play increasingly important role, as the analytical predictions are expected to reach their precision limits for upcoming experiments. Creating an emulator of the cosmological mass maps themselves, rather than their summary statistics, is a more challenging task. Modern deep generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), have demonstrated their potential to achieve this goal. Most existing GAN approaches produce simulations for a fixed value of the cosmological parameters, which limits their practical applicability. We propose a novel conditional GAN model that is able to generate mass maps for any pair of matter density Ω and matter clustering strength σ ₈, parameters which have the largest impact on the evolution of structures in the Universe, for a given source galaxy redshift distribution n(z). Our results show that our conditional GAN can interpolate efficiently within the space of simulated cosmologies, and generate maps anywhere inside this space with good visual quality high statistical accuracy. We perform an extensive quantitative comparison of the N-body and GAN -generated maps using a range of metrics: the pixel histograms, peak counts, power spectra, bispectra, Minkowski functionals, correlation matrices of the power spectra, the Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Index (MS-SSIM) and our equivalent of the Fréchet Inception Distance. We find a very good agreement on these metrics, with typical differences are <5% at the center of the simulation grid, and slightly worse for cosmologies at the grid edges. The agreement for the bispectrum is slightly worse, on the <20% level. This contribution is a step toward building emulators of mass maps directly, capturing both the cosmological signal and its variability. We make the code and the data publicly available.