THE EFFECTS OF SOURCE CLUSTERING ON WEAK LENSING STATISTICS

I investigate the effects of source clustering on the weak lensing sta tistics, more particularly on the statistical properties of the local convergence, kappa, at large angular scales. The Perturbation Theory a pproach shows that the variance is not affected by source clustering a t leading order but higher order moments such as the third and fourth moments can be. I compute the magnitude of these effects in case of an Einstein-de Sitter Universe for the angular top-hat filtered converge nce. In these calculations the so-called Broadhurst and multiple lens coupling effects are neglected. The source clustering effect is found to be particularly important when the redshift distribution is broad e nough so that remote background sources can be significantly lensed by closer concentrations of galaxy sources. The source clustering effect s are shown to remain negligible, for both the skewness and the kurtos is, when the dispersion of the redshift of the sources is less than ab out 0.15.