No Arabic abstract
We study the clustering of galaxies detected at $i<22.5$ in the Science Verification observations of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Two-point correlation functions are measured using $2.3times 10^6$ galaxies over a contiguous 116 deg$^2$ region in five bins of photometric redshift width $Delta z = 0.2$ in the range $0.2 < z < 1.2.$ The impact of photometric redshift errors are assessed by comparing results using a template-based photo-$z$ algorithm (BPZ) to a machine-learning algorithm (TPZ). A companion paper (Leistedt et al 2015) presents maps of several observational variables (e.g. seeing, sky brightness) which could modulate the galaxy density. Here we characterize and mitigate systematic errors on the measured clustering which arise from these observational variables, in addition to others such as Galactic dust and stellar contamination. After correcting for systematic effects we measure galaxy bias over a broad range of linear scales relative to mass clustering predicted from the Planck $Lambda$CDM model, finding agreement with CFHTLS measurements with $chi^2$ of 4.0 (8.7) with 5 degrees of freedom for the TPZ (BPZ) redshifts. We test a linear bias model, in which the galaxy clustering is a fixed multiple of the predicted non-linear dark-matter clustering. The precision of the data allow us to determine that the linear bias model describes the observed galaxy clustering to $2.5%$ accuracy down to scales at least $4$ to $10$ times smaller than those on which linear theory is expected to be sufficient.
We present galaxy-galaxy lensing results from 139 square degrees of Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification (SV) data. Our lens sample consists of red galaxies, known as redMaGiC, which are specifically selected to have a low photometric redshift error and outlier rate. The lensing measurement has a total signal-to-noise of 29 over scales $0.09 < R < 15$ Mpc/$h$, including all lenses over a wide redshift range $0.2 < z < 0.8$. Dividing the lenses into three redshift bins for this constant moving number density sample, we find no evidence for evolution in the halo mass with redshift. We obtain consistent results for the lensing measurement with two independent shear pipelines, ngmix and im3shape. We perform a number of null tests on the shear and photometric redshift catalogs and quantify resulting systematic uncertainties. Covariances from jackknife subsamples of the data are validated with a suite of 50 mock surveys. The results and systematics checks in this work provide a critical input for future cosmological and galaxy evolution studies with the DES data and redMaGiC galaxy samples. We fit a Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) model, and demonstrate that our data constrains the mean halo mass of the lens galaxies, despite strong degeneracies between individual HOD parameters.
We present a measurement of galaxy-galaxy lensing around a magnitude-limited ($i_{AB} < 22.5$) sample of galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification (DES-SV) data. We split these lenses into three photometric-redshift bins from 0.2 to 0.8, and determine the product of the galaxy bias $b$ and cross-correlation coefficient between the galaxy and dark matter overdensity fields $r$ in each bin, using scales above 4 Mpc/$h$ comoving, where we find the linear bias model to be valid given our current uncertainties. We compare our galaxy bias results from galaxy-galaxy lensing with those obtained from galaxy clustering (Crocce et al. 2016) and CMB lensing (Giannantonio et al. 2016) for the same sample of galaxies, and find our measurements to be in good agreement with those in Crocce et al. (2016), while, in the lowest redshift bin ($zsim0.3$), they show some tension with the findings in Giannantonio et al. (2016). We measure $bcdot r$ to be $0.87pm 0.11$, $1.12 pm 0.16$ and $1.24pm 0.23$, respectively for the three redshift bins of width $Delta z = 0.2$ in the range $0.2<z <0.8$, defined with the photometric-redshift algorithm BPZ. Using a different code to split the lens sample, TPZ, leads to changes in the measured biases at the 10-20% level, but it does not alter the main conclusion of this work: when comparing with Crocce et al. (2016) we do not find strong evidence for a cross-correlation parameter significantly below one in this galaxy sample, except possibly at the lowest redshift bin ($zsim 0.3$), where we find $r = 0.71 pm 0.11$ when using TPZ, and $0.83 pm 0.12$ with BPZ.
We describe updates to the redmapper{} algorithm, a photometric red-sequence cluster finder specifically designed for large photometric surveys. The updated algorithm is applied to $150,mathrm{deg}^2$ of Science Verification (SV) data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR8 photometric data set. The DES SV catalog is locally volume limited, and contains 786 clusters with richness $lambda>20$ (roughly equivalent to $M_{rm{500c}}gtrsim10^{14},h_{70}^{-1},M_{odot}$) and $0.2<z<0.9$. The DR8 catalog consists of 26311 clusters with $0.08<z<0.6$, with a sharply increasing richness threshold as a function of redshift for $zgtrsim 0.35$. The photometric redshift performance of both catalogs is shown to be excellent, with photometric redshift uncertainties controlled at the $sigma_z/(1+z)sim 0.01$ level for $zlesssim0.7$, rising to $sim0.02$ at $zsim0.9$ in DES SV. We make use of emph{Chandra} and emph{XMM} X-ray and South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zeldovich data to show that the centering performance and mass--richness scatter are consistent with expectations based on prior runs of redmapper{} on SDSS data. We also show how the redmapper{} photoz{} and richness estimates are relatively insensitive to imperfect star/galaxy separation and small-scale star masks.
Spatially-varying depth and characteristics of observing conditions, such as seeing, airmass, or sky background, are major sources of systematic uncertainties in modern galaxy survey analyses, in particular in deep multi-epoch surveys. We present a framework to extract and project these sources of systematics onto the sky, and apply it to the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to map the observing conditions of the Science Verification (SV) data. The resulting distributions and maps of sources of systematics are used in several analyses of DES SV to perform detailed null tests with the data, and also to incorporate systematics in survey simulations. We illustrate the complementarity of these two approaches by comparing the SV data with the BCC-UFig, a synthetic sky catalogue generated by forward-modelling of the DES SV images. We analyse the BCC-UFig simulation to construct galaxy samples mimicking those used in SV galaxy clustering studies. We show that the spatially-varying survey depth imprinted in the observed galaxy densities and the redshift distributions of the SV data are successfully reproduced by the simulation and well-captured by the maps of observing conditions. The combined use of the maps, the SV data and the BCC-UFig simulation allows us to quantify the impact of spatial systematics on $N(z)$, the redshift distributions inferred using photometric redshifts. We conclude that spatial systematics in the SV data are mainly due to seeing fluctuations and are under control in current clustering and weak lensing analyses. The framework presented here is relevant to all multi-epoch surveys, and will be essential for exploiting future surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will require detailed null-tests and realistic end-to-end image simulations to correctly interpret the deep, high-cadence observations of the sky.