No Arabic abstract
We study the prospects for detecting neutrino masses from the galaxy angular power spectrum in photometric redshift shells of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) over a volume of 20 (Gpc/h)^3 combined with the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) angular fluctuations expected to be measured from the Planck satellite. We find that for a Lambda-CDM concordance model with 7 free parameters in addition to a fiducial neutrino mass of M_nu = 0.24 eV, we recover from DES &Planck the correct value with uncertainty of +- 0.12 eV (95 % CL), assuming perfect knowledge of the galaxy biasing. If the fiducial total mass is close to zero, then the upper limit is 0.11 eV (95 % CL). This upper limit from DES &Planck is over 3 times tighter than using Planck alone, as DES breaks the parameter degeneracies in a CMB-only analysis. The analysis utlilizes spherical harmonics up to 300, averaged in bin of 10 to mimic the DES sky coverage. The results are similar if we supplement DES bands (grizY) with the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS) near infrared band (JHK). The result is robust to uncertainties in non-linear fluctuations and redshift distortions. However, the result is sensitive to the assumed galaxy biasing schemes and it requires accurate prior knowledge of the biasing. To summarize, if the total neutrino mass in nature greater than 0.1eV, we should be able to detect it with DES &Planck, a result with great importance to fundamental Physics.
We measure the clustering of DES Year 1 galaxies that are intended to be combined with weak lensing samples in order to produce precise cosmological constraints from the joint analysis of large-scale structure and lensing correlations. Two-point correlation functions are measured for a sample of $6.6 times 10^{5}$ luminous red galaxies selected using the textsc{redMaGiC} algorithm over an area of $1321$ square degrees, in the redshift range $0.15 < z < 0.9$, split into five tomographic redshift bins. The sample has a mean redshift uncertainty of $sigma_{z}/(1+z) = 0.017$. We quantify and correct spurious correlations induced by spatially variable survey properties, testing their impact on the clustering measurements and covariance. We demonstrate the samples robustness by testing for stellar contamination, for potential biases that could arise from the systematic correction, and for the consistency between the two-point auto- and cross-correlation functions. We show that the corrections we apply have a significant impact on the resultant measurement of cosmological parameters, but that the results are robust against arbitrary choices in the correction method. We find the linear galaxy bias in each redshift bin in a fiducial cosmology to be $b(z$=$0.24)=1.40 pm 0.08$, $b(z$=$0.38)=1.61 pm 0.05$, $b(z$=$0.53)=1.60 pm 0.04$ for galaxies with luminosities $L/L_*>$$0.5$, $b(z$=$0.68)=1.93 pm 0.05$ for $L/L_*>$$1$ and $b(z$=$0.83)=1.99 pm 0.07$ for $L/L_*$$>1.5$, broadly consistent with expectations for the redshift and luminosity dependence of the bias of red galaxies. We show these measurements to be consistent with the linear bias obtained from tangential shear measurements.
We present a validation of the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 (DES Y3) $3times2$-point analysis choices by testing them on Buzzard v2.0, a new suite of cosmological simulations that is tailored for the testing and validation of combined galaxy clustering and weak lensing analyses. We show that the Buzzard v2.0 simulations accurately reproduce many important aspects of the DES Y3 data, including photometric redshift and magnitude distributions, and the relevant set of two-point clustering and weak lensing statistics. We then show that our model for the $3times2$-point data vector is accurate enough to recover the true cosmology in simulated surveys assuming the true redshift distributions for our source and lens samples, demonstrating robustness to uncertainties in the modeling of the non-linear matter power spectrum, non-linear galaxy bias and higher-order lensing corrections. Additionally, we demonstrate for the first time that our photometric redshift calibration methodology, including information from photometry, spectroscopy, clustering cross-correlations, and galaxy-galaxy lensing ratios, is accurate enough to recover the true cosmology in simulated surveys in the presence of realistic photometric redshift uncertainties.
We present cosmological constraints from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) using a combined analysis of angular clustering of red galaxies and their cross-correlation with weak gravitational lensing of background galaxies. We use a 139 square degree contiguous patch of DES data from the Science Verification (SV) period of observations. Using large scale measurements, we constrain the matter density of the Universe as Omega_m = 0.31 +/- 0.09 and the clustering amplitude of the matter power spectrum as sigma_8 = 0.74 +/- 0.13 after marginalizing over seven nuisance parameters and three additional cosmological parameters. This translates into S_8 = sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^{0.16} = 0.74 +/- 0.12 for our fiducial lens redshift bin at 0.35 <z< 0.5, while S_8 = 0.78 +/- 0.09 using two bins over the range 0.2 <z< 0.5. We study the robustness of the results under changes in the data vectors, modelling and systematics treatment, including photometric redshift and shear calibration uncertainties, and find consistency in the derived cosmological parameters. We show that our results are consistent with previous cosmological analyses from DES and other data sets and conclude with a joint analysis of DES angular clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing with Planck CMB data, Baryon Accoustic Oscillations and Supernova type Ia measurements.
We perform an analysis in harmonic space of the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Data (DES-Y1) galaxy clustering data using products obtained for the real-space analysis. We test our pipeline with a suite of lognormal simulations, which are used to validate scale cuts in harmonic space as well as to provide a covariance matrix that takes into account the DES-Y1 mask. We then apply this pipeline to DES-Y1 data taking into account survey property maps derived for the real-space analysis. We compare with real-space DES-Y1 results obtained from a similar pipeline. We show that the harmonic space analysis we develop yields results that are compatible with the real-space analysis for the bias parameters. This verification paves the way to performing a harmonic space analysis for the upcoming DES-Y3 data.
We implement a linear model for mitigating the effect of observing conditions and other sources of contamination in galaxy clustering analyses. Our treatment improves upon the fiducial systematics treatment of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 (Y1) cosmology analysis in four crucial ways. Specifically, our treatment: 1) does not require decisions as to which observable systematics are significant and which are not, allowing for the possibility of multiple maps adding coherently to give rise to significant bias even if no single map leads to a significant bias by itself; 2) characterizes both the statistical and systematic uncertainty in our mitigation procedure, allowing us to propagate said uncertainties into the reported cosmological constraints; 3) explicitly exploits the full spatial structure of the galaxy density field to differentiate between cosmology-sourced and systematics-sourced fluctuations within the galaxy density field; 4) is fully automated, and can therefore be trivially applied to any data set. The updated correlation function for the DES Y1 redMaGiC catalog minimally impacts the cosmological posteriors from that analysis. Encouragingly, our analysis does improve the goodness of fit statistic of the DES Y1 3$times$2pt data set ($Delta chi^2 = -6.5$ with no additional parameters). This improvement is due in nearly equal parts to both the change in the correlation function and the added statistical and systematic uncertainties associated with our method. We expect the difference in mitigation techniques to become more important in future work as the size of cosmological data sets grows.