Weak Lensing from Strong Clustering

Abstract

We investigate the effect of weak gravitational lensing in the limit of small angular scales where projected galaxy clustering is strongly nonlinear. This is the regime likely to be probed by future weak lensing surveys. We use well-motivated hierarchical scaling arguments and the plane-parallel approximation to study multi-point statistical properties of the convergence field. These statistics can be used to compute the vertex amplitudes in tree models of hierarchical clustering; these can be compared with similar measurements from galaxy surveys, leading to a powerful probe of galaxy bias.