A tomographic spherical mass map emulator of the KiDS-1000 survey using conditional generative adversarial networks

Large sets of matter density simulations are becoming increasingly important in large scale structure cosmology. Matter power spectra emulators, such as the Euclid Emulator and CosmicEmu, are trained on simulations to correct the non-linear part of the power spectrum. Map-based analyses retrieve additional non-Gaussian information from the density field, whether through human-designed statistics such as peak counts, or via machine learning methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The simulations required for these methods are very resource-intensive, both in terms of computing time and storage. Map-level density field emulators, based on deep generative models, have recently been proposed to address these challenges. In this work, we present a novel mass map emulator of the KiDS-1000 survey footprint, which generates noise-free spherical maps in a fraction of a second. It takes a set of cosmological parameters $(\Omega_M, \sigma_8)$ as input and produces a consistent set of 5 maps, corresponding to the KiDS-1000 tomographic redshift bins. To construct the emulator, we use a conditional generative adversarial network architecture and the spherical CNN $\texttt{DeepSphere}$, and train it on N-body-simulated mass maps. We compare its performance using an array of quantitative comparison metrics: angular power spectra $C_\ell$, pixel/peaks distributions, $C_\ell$ correlation matrices, and Structural Similarity Index. Overall, the agreement on these summary statistics is $