No Arabic abstract
Galaxy-galaxy-galaxy lensing (G3L) is a powerful tool for constraining the three-point correlation between the galaxy and matter distribution and thereby models of galaxy evolution. We propose three improvements to current measurements of G3L: (i) a weighting of lens galaxies according to their redshift difference, (ii) adaptive binning of the three-point correlation function, and (iii) accounting for the effect of lens magnification by the cosmic large-scale structure. Improvement (i) is designed to improve the precision of the G3L measurement, whereas improvements (ii) and (iii) remove biases of the estimator. We further show how the G3L signal can be converted from angular into physical scales. The improvements were tested on simple mock data and simulated data based on the Millennium Run with an implemented semi-analytic galaxy model. Our improvements increase the signal-to-noise ratio by 35 % on average at angular scales between 0.1 arcmin and 10 arcmin and physical scales between $0.02$ and $2 , h^{-1}, textrm{Mpc}$. They also remove the bias of the G3L estimator at angular scales below 1 arcmin, which was originally up to 40 %. The signal due to lens magnification is approximately 10 % of the total signal.
We study moderate gravitational lensing where a background galaxy is magnified substantially, but not multiply imaged, by an intervening galaxy. We focus on the case where both the lens and source are elliptical galaxies. The signatures of moderate lensing include isophotal distortions and systematic shifts in the fundamental plane and Kormendy relation, which can potentially be used to statistically determine the galaxy mass profiles. These effects are illustrated using Monte Carlo simulations of galaxy pairs where the foreground galaxy is modelled as a singular isothermal sphere model and observational parameters appropriate for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The range in radius probed by moderate lensing will be larger than that by strong lensing, and is in the interesting regime where the density slope may be changing.
We study the impact of lensing corrections on modeling cross correlations between CMB lensing and galaxies, cosmic shear and galaxies, and galaxies in different redshift bins. Estimating the importance of these corrections becomes necessary in the light of anticipated high-accuracy measurements of these observables. While higher order lensing corrections (sometimes also referred to as post Born corrections) have been shown to be negligibly small for lensing auto correlations, they have not been studied for cross correlations. We evaluate the contributing four-point functions without making use of the Limber approximation and compute line-of-sight integrals with the numerically stable and fast FFTlog formalism. We find that the relative size of lensing corrections depends on the respective redshift distributions of the lensing sources and galaxies, but that they are generally small for high signal-to-noise correlations. We point out that a full assessment and judgement of the importance of these corrections requires the inclusion of lensing Jacobian terms on the galaxy side. We identify these additional correction terms, but do not evaluate them due to their large number. We argue that they could be potentially important and suggest that their size should be measured in the future with ray-traced simulations. We make our code publicly available.
We compare predictions for galaxy-galaxy lensing profiles and clustering from the Henriques et al. (2015) public version of the Munich semi-analytical model of galaxy formation (SAM) and the IllustrisTNG suite, primarily TNG300, with observations from KiDS+GAMA and SDSS-DR7 using four different selection functions for the lenses (stellar mass, stellar mass and group membership, stellar mass and isolation criteria, stellar mass and colour). We find that this version of the SAM does not agree well with the current data for stellar mass-only lenses with $M_ast > 10^{11},M_odot$. By decreasing the merger time for satellite galaxies as well as reducing the radio-mode AGN accretion efficiency in the SAM, we obtain better agreement, both for the lensing and the clustering, at the high mass end. We show that the new model is consistent with the signals for central galaxies presented in Velliscig et al. (2017). Turning to the hydrodynamical simulation, TNG300 produces good lensing predictions, both for stellar mass-only ($chi^2 = 1.81$ compared to $chi^2 = 7.79$ for the SAM), and locally brightest galaxies samples ($chi^2 = 3.80$ compared to $chi^2 = 5.01$). With added dust corrections to the colours it matches the SDSS clustering signal well for red low mass galaxies. We find that both the SAMs and TNG300 predict $sim 50,%$ excessive lensing signals for intermediate mass red galaxies with $10.2 < log_{10} M_ast [ M_odot ] < 11.2$ at $r approx 0.6,h^{-1},mathrm{Mpc}$, which require further theoretical development.
It is of great interest to measure the properties of substructures in dark matter halos at galactic and cluster scales. Here we suggest a method to constrain substructure properties using the variance of weak gravitational flexion in a galaxy-galaxy lensing context. We show the effectiveness of flexion variance in measuring substructures in N-body simulations of dark matter halos, and present the expected galaxy-galaxy lensing signals. We show the insensitivity of the method to the overall galaxy halo mass, and predict the methods signal-to-noise for a space-based all-sky survey, showing that the presence of substructure down to 10^9 M_odot halos can be reliably detected.
We present and characterize the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal measured using the first three years of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES Y3) covering 4132 deg$^2$. These galaxy-galaxy measurements are used in the DES Y3 3$times$2pt cosmological analysis, which combines weak lensing and galaxy clustering information. We use two lens samples: a magnitude-limited sample and the redMaGic sample, which span the redshift range $sim 0.2-1$ with 10.7 M and 2.6 M galaxies respectively. For the source catalog, we use the Metacalibration shape sample, consisting of $simeq$100 M galaxies separated into 4 tomographic bins. Our galaxy-galaxy lensing estimator is the mean tangential shear, for which we obtain a total S/N of $sim$148 for MagLim ($sim$120 for redMaGic), and $sim$67 ($sim$55) after applying the scale cuts of 6 Mpc/$h$. Thus we reach percent-level statistical precision, which requires that our modeling and systematic-error control be of comparable accuracy. The tangential shear model used in the 3$times$2pt cosmological analysis includes lens magnification, a five-parameter intrinsic alignment model (TATT), marginalization over a point-mass to remove information from small scales and a linear galaxy bias model validated with higher-order terms. We explore the impact of these choices on the tangential shear observable and study the significance of effects not included in our model, such as reduced shear, source magnification and source clustering. We also test the robustness of our measurements to various observational and systematics effects, such as the impact of observing conditions, lens-source clustering, random-point subtraction, scale-dependent Metacalibration responses, PSF residuals, and B-modes.