2025/10/30 by Shinde, Rahul, Dell'Antonio, Ian
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.26318
Direct detection of intercluster filaments is challenging due to their low surface density, resulting in a weak deflection field. We present weak-lensing detections of intercluster filaments using wide-field Dark Energy Camera (DECam) observations from the Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey (LoVoCCS). A matched-filter method was applied to identify filamentary structures in three nearby (z < 0.1) systems centered on Abell 401, Abell 2029, and Abell 3558. We discover two prominent filaments (≥ 4σ) in each system, with the strongest detections (6.4σ- 7.3σ) around Abell 401 and Abell 2029. In particular, we report the first robust weak-lensing detections (>5 σ) of the intercluster bridges connecting the cluster pairs Abell 401/399, Abell 2029/2033, Abell 2029/SIG, and Abell 3558/3556. Adopting a filament convergence model motivated by numerical simulations, we infer the maximum convergence (κ0) and characteristic width (hc) for all six filaments, yielding κ0 ∼ 0.015 - 0.053 and hc ∼ 0.11 - 0.45 Mpc. The performance of the matched-filter technique is validated using mock shear catalogs and further tested on a null field around Abell 2351. We also explore the potential of using the B-mode lensing signal of filaments to suppress cluster-induced shear contamination. These results demonstrate the feasibility of directly mapping dark matter filaments with current and future wide-field weak-lensing datasets.