No Arabic abstract
We present new tests to identify stationary position-dependent additive shear biases in weak gravitational lensing data sets. These tests are important diagnostics for currently ongoing and planned cosmic shear surveys, as such biases induce coherent shear patterns that can mimic and potentially bias the cosmic shear signal. The central idea of these tests is to determine the average ellipticity of all galaxies with shape measurements in a grid in the pixel plane. The distribution of the absolute values of these averaged ellipticities can be compared to randomized catalogues; a difference points to systematics in the data. In addition, we introduce a method to quantify the spatial correlation of the additive bias, which suppresses the contribution from cosmic shear and therefore eases the identification of a position-dependent additive shear bias in the data. We apply these tests to the publicly available shear catalogues from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) and the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) and find evidence for a small but non-negligible residual additive bias at small scales. As this residual bias is smaller than the error on the shear correlation signal at those scales, it is highly unlikely that it causes a significant bias in the published cosmic shear results of CFHTLenS. In CFHTLenS, the amplitude of this systematic signal is consistent with zero in fields where the number of stars used to model the PSF is higher than average, suggesting that the position-dependent additive shear bias originates from undersampled PSF variations across the image.
In this paper we investigate the impact that realistic scale-dependence systematic effects may have on cosmic shear tomography. We model spatially varying residual ellipticity and size variations in weak lensing measurements and propagate these through to predicted changes in the uncertainty and bias of cosmological parameters. We show that the survey strategy - whether it is regular or randomised - is an important factor in determining the impact of a systematic effect: a purely randomised survey strategy produces the smallest biases, at the expense of larger parameter uncertainties, and a very regularised survey strategy produces large biases, but unaffected uncertainties. However, by removing, or modelling, the affected scales (l-modes) in the regular cases the biases are reduced to negligible levels. We find that the integral of the systematic power spectrum is not a good metric for dark energy performance, and we advocate that systematic effects should be modelled accurately in real space, where they enter the measurement process, and their effect subsequently propagated into power spectrum contributions.
We apply the Fourier Power Function Shapelets (FPFS) shear estimator to the first year data of the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey to construct a shape catalog. The FPFS shear estimator has been demonstrated to have multiplicative bias less than $1%$ in the absence of blending, regardless of complexities of galaxy shapes, smears of point spread functions (PSFs) and contamination from noise. The blending bias is calibrated with realistic image simulations, which include the impact of neighboring objects, using the COSMOS Hubble Space Telescope images. Here we carefully test the influence of PSF model residual on the FPFS shear estimation and the uncertainties in the shear calibration. Internal null tests are conducted to characterize potential systematics in the FPFS shape catalog and the results are compared with those measured using a catalog where the shapes were estimated using the re-Gaussianization algorithms. Furthermore, we compare various weak lensing measurements between the FPFS shape catalog and the re-Gaussianization shape catalog and conclude that the weak lensing measurements between these two shape catalogs are consistent with each other within the statistical uncertainty.
With the advent of large-scale weak lensing surveys there is a need to understand how realistic, scale-dependent systematics bias cosmic shear and dark energy measurements, and how they can be removed. Here we describe how spatial variations in the amplitude and orientation of realistic image distortions convolve with the measured shear field, mixing the even-parity convergence and odd-parity modes, and bias the shear power spectrum. Many of these biases can be removed by calibration to external data, the survey itself, or by modelling in simulations. The uncertainty in the calibration must be marginalised over and we calculate how this propagates into parameter estimation, degrading the dark energy Figure-of-Merit. We find that noise-like biases affect dark energy measurements the most, while spikes in the bias power have the least impact, reflecting their correlation with the effect of cosmological parameters. We argue that in order to remove systematic biases in cosmic shear surveys and maintain statistical power effort should be put into improving the accuracy of the bias calibration rather than minimising the size of the bias. In general, this appears to be a weaker condition for bias removal. We also investigate how to minimise the size of the calibration set for a fixed reduction in the Figure-of-Merit. These results can be used to model the effect of biases and calibration on a cosmic shear survey accurately, assess their impact on the measurement of modified gravity and dark energy models, and to optimise surveys and calibration requirements.
Stage IV weak lensing experiments will offer more than an order of magnitude leap in precision. We must therefore ensure that our analyses remain accurate in this new era. Accordingly, previously ignored systematic effects must be addressed. In this work, we evaluate the impact of the reduced shear approximation and magnification bias, on the information obtained from the angular power spectrum. To first-order, the statistics of reduced shear, a combination of shear and convergence, are taken to be equal to those of shear. However, this approximation can induce a bias in the cosmological parameters that can no longer be neglected. A separate bias arises from the statistics of shear being altered by the preferential selection of galaxies and the dilution of their surface densities, in high-magnification regions. The corrections for these systematic effects take similar forms, allowing them to be treated together. We calculated the impact of neglecting these effects on the cosmological parameters that would be determined from Euclid, using cosmic shear tomography. To do so, we employed the Fisher matrix formalism, and included the impact of the super-sample covariance. We also demonstrate how the reduced shear correction can be calculated using a lognormal field forward modelling approach. These effects cause significant biases in Omega_m, sigma_8, n_s, Omega_DE, w_0, and w_a of -0.53 sigma, 0.43 sigma, -0.34 sigma, 1.36 sigma, -0.68 sigma, and 1.21 sigma, respectively. We then show that these lensing biases interact with another systematic: the intrinsic alignment of galaxies. Accordingly, we develop the formalism for an intrinsic alignment-enhanced lensing bias correction. Applying this to Euclid, we find that the additional terms introduced by this correction are sub-dominant.
Redshift space distortion (RSD) observed in galaxy redshift surveys is a powerful tool to test gravity theories on cosmological scales, but the systematic uncertainties must carefully be examined for future surveys with large statistics. Here we employ various analytic models of RSD and estimate the systematic errors on measurements of the structure growth-rate parameter, $fsigma_8$, induced by non-linear effects and the halo bias with respect to the dark matter distribution, by using halo catalogues from 40 realisations of $3.4 times 10^8$ comoving $h^{-3}$Mpc$^3$ cosmological N-body simulations. We consider hypothetical redshift surveys at redshifts z=0.5, 1.35 and 2, and different minimum halo mass thresholds in the range of $5.0 times 10^{11}$ -- $2.0 times 10^{13} h^{-1} M_odot$. We find that the systematic error of $fsigma_8$ is greatly reduced to ~5 per cent level, when a recently proposed analytical formula of RSD that takes into account the higher-order coupling between the density and velocity fields is adopted, with a scale-dependent parametric bias model. Dependence of the systematic error on the halo mass, the redshift, and the maximum wavenumber used in the analysis is discussed. We also find that the Wilson-Hilferty transformation is useful to improve the accuracy of likelihood analysis when only a small number of modes are available in power spectrum measurements.