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Register a new userObserving Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations in tomographic cosmic shear surveys
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We show that it is possible to build effective matter density power spectra in tomographic cosmic shear observations that exhibit the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) features once a nulling transformation has been applied to the data. The precision with which the amplitude and position of these features can be reconstructed is quantified in terms of sky coverage, intrinsic shape noise, median source redshift and number density of sources. BAO detection in Euclid or LSST like wide surveys will be possible with a modest signal-to-noise ratio. It would improve dramatically for slightly deeper surveys.
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We assess the detectability of baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the power spectrum of galaxies using ultra large volume N-body simulations of the hierarchical clustering of dark matter and semi-analytical modelling of galaxy formation. A step-by-step illustration is given of the various effects (nonlinear fluctuation growth, peculiar motions, nonlinear and scale dependent bias) which systematically change the form of the galaxy power spectrum on large scales from the simple prediction of linear perturbation theory. Using a new method to extract the scale of the oscillations, we nevertheless find that the BAO approach gives an unbiased estimate of the sound horizon scale. Sampling variance remains the dominant source of error despite the huge volume of our simulation box ($=2.41 h^{-3}{rm Gpc}^{3}$). We use our results to forecast the accuracy with which forthcoming surveys will be able to measure the sound horizon scale, $s$, and, hence constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter, $w$ (with simplifying assumptions and without marginalizing over the other cosmological parameters). Pan-STARRS could potentially yield a measurement with an accuracy of $Delta s/s = 0.5-0.7 % $ (corresponding to $Delta w approx 2-3% $), which is competitive with the proposed WFMOS survey ($Delta s/s = 1% $ $Delta w approx 4 % $). Achieving $Delta w le 1% $ using BAO alone is beyond any currently commissioned project and will require an all-sky spectroscopic survey, such as would be undertaken by the SPACE mission concept under proposal to ESA.
While baryonic feedback is one of the most important astrophysical systematics that we need to address in order to achieve precision cosmology, few weak lensing studies have directly measured its impact on the matter power spectrum. We report measurement of the baryonic feedback parameter with the constraints on its lower and upper limits from cosmic shear. We use the public data from the Kilo-Degree Survey and the VISTA Kilo-Degree Infrared Galaxy Survey spanning 450 deg$^2$. Estimating both cosmological and feedback parameters simultaneously, we obtain $A_{rm b}=1.01_{-0.85}^{+0.80}$, which shows a consistency with the dark matter-only (DMO) case at the $sim1.2~sigma$ level and a tendency toward positive feedback; the $A_{rm b}=0$ ($0.81$) value corresponds to the DMO (OWLS AGN) case. Despite this full constraint of the feedback parameter, our $S_8~(equiv sigma_8 sqrt{Omega_m / 0.3})$ measurement ($0.739^{+0.036}_{- 0.035}$) shifts by only $sim6$% of the statistical error, compared to the previous measurement. When we assume the flat $Lambda$CDM cosmology favored by the Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (Planck) result, the feedback parameter is constrained to be $A_{rm b}=1.21_{-0.54}^{+0.61}$ ($1.60_{-0.52}^{+0.53}$), which excludes the DMO case at the $sim2.2~sigma$ ($sim3.1~sigma$) level.
Baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs) modulate the density ratio of baryons to dark matter across large regions of the Universe. We show that the associated variation in the mass-to-light ratio of galaxies should generate an oscillatory, scale-dependent bias of galaxies relative to the underlying distribution of dark matter. A measurement of this effect would calibrate the dependence of the characteristic mass-to-light ratio of galaxies on the baryon mass fraction in their large scale environment. This bias, though, is unlikely to significantly affect measurements of BAO peak positions.
We present a semi-analytic model for the shear two-point correlation function of a cosmic shear survey with non-uniform depth. Ground-based surveys are subject to depth variations that primarily arise through varying atmospheric conditions. For a survey like the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), we find that the measured depth variation increases the amplitude of the observed shear correlation function at the level of a few percent out to degree-scales, relative to the assumed uniform-depth case. The impact on the inferred cosmological parameters is shown to be insignificant for a KiDS-like survey. For next-generation cosmic shear experiments, however, we conclude that variable depth should be accounted for.
We show that the lensing efficiency of cosmic shear generically has a simple shape, even in the case of a tomographic survey with badly behaved photometric redshifts. We argue that source distributions for cosmic shear can therefore be more effectively parametrised in ``efficiency space. Using realistic simulations, we find that the true lensing efficiency of a current cosmic shear survey without disconnected outliers in the redshift distributions can be described to per cent accuracy with only two parameters, and the approach straightforwardly generalises to other parametric forms and surveys. The cosmic shear signal is thus largely insensitive to the details of the source distributions, and the features that matter can be summarised by a small number of suitable efficiency parameters. For the simulated survey, we show that prior knowledge at the 10% level, which is attainable e.g. from photometric redshifts, is enough to marginalise over the efficiency parameters without severely affecting the constraints on the cosmology parameters $Omega_m$ and $sigma_8$.
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