Effects of baryons on weak lensing peak statistics
  Upcoming weak-lensing surveys have the potential to become leading
cosmological probes provided all systematic effects are under control.
Recently, the ejection of gas due to feedback energy from active galactic
nuclei (AGN) has been identified as major source of uncertainty, challenging
the success of future weak-lensing probes in terms of cosmology. In this paper
we investigate the effects of baryons on the number of weak-lensing peaks in
the convergence field. Our analysis is based on full-sky convergence maps
constructed via light-cones from $N$-body simulations, and we rely on the
baryonic correction model of Schneider et al. (2019) to model the baryonic
effects on the density field. As a result we find that the baryonic effects
strongly depend on the Gaussian smoothing applied to the convergence map. For a
DES-like survey setup, a smoothing of $\theta_k\gtrsim8$ arcmin is sufficient
to keep the baryon signal below the expected statistical error. Smaller
smoothing scales lead to a significant suppression of high peaks (with
signal-to-noise above 2), while lower peaks are not affected. The situation is
more severe for a Euclid-like setup, where a smoothing of $\theta_k\gtrsim16$
arcmin is required to keep the baryonic suppression signal below the
statistical error. Smaller smoothing scales require a full modelling of
baryonic effects since both low and high peaks are strongly affected by
baryonic feedback.
