No Arabic abstract
We use matter power spectra from cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to quantify the effect of baryon physics on the weak gravitational lensing shear signal. The simulations consider a number of processes, such as radiative cooling, star formation, supernovae and feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN). Van Daalen et al. (2011) used the same simulations to show that baryon physics, in particular the strong feedback that is required to solve the overcooling problem, modifies the matter power spectrum on scales relevant for cosmological weak lensing studies. As a result, the use of power spectra from dark matter simulations can lead to significant biases in the inferred cosmological parameters. We show that the typical biases are much larger than the precision with which future missions aim to constrain the dark energy equation of state, w_0. For instance, the simulation with AGN feedback, which reproduces X-ray and optical properties of groups of galaxies, gives rise to a ~40% bias in w_0. We demonstrate that the modification of the power spectrum is dominated by groups and clusters of galaxies, the effect of which can be modelled. We consider an approach based on the popular halo model and show that simple modifications can capture the main features of baryonic feedback. Despite its simplicity, we find that our model, when calibrated on the simulations, is able to reduce the bias in w_0 to a level comparable to the size of the statistical uncertainties for a Euclid-like mission. While observations of the gas and stellar fractions as a function of halo mass can be used to calibrate the model, hydrodynamic simulations will likely still be needed to extend the observed scaling relations down to halo masses of 10 ^12 M_sun/h.
The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) comprises deep multi-colour (u*griz) photometry spanning 154 square degrees, with accurate photometric redshifts and shape measurements. We demonstrate that the redshift probability distribution function summed over galaxies provides an accurate representation of the galaxy redshift distribution accounting for random and catastrophic errors for galaxies with best fitting photometric redshifts z_p < 1.3. We present cosmological constraints using tomographic weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structure. We use two broad redshift bins 0.5 < z_p <= 0.85 and 0.85 < z_p <= 1.3 free of intrinsic alignment contamination, and measure the shear correlation function on angular scales in the range ~1-40 arcmin. We show that the problematic redshift scaling of the shear signal, found in previous CFHTLS data analyses, does not afflict the CFHTLenS data. For a flat Lambda-CDM model and a fixed matter density Omega_m=0.27, we find the normalisation of the matter power spectrum sigma_8=0.771 pm 0.041. When combined with cosmic microwave background data (WMAP7), baryon acoustic oscillation data (BOSS), and a prior on the Hubble constant from the HST distance ladder, we find that CFHTLenS improves the precision of the fully marginalised parameter estimates by an average factor of 1.5-2. Combining our results with the above cosmological probes, we find Omega_m=0.2762 pm 0.0074 and sigma_8=0.802 pm 0.013.
Using a sample of 608 Type Ia supernovae from the SDSS-II and BOSS surveys, combined with a sample of foreground galaxies from SDSS-II, we estimate the weak lensing convergence for each supernova line-of-sight. We find that the correlation between this measurement and the Hubble residuals is consistent with the prediction from lensing (at a significance of 1.7sigma. Strong correlations are also found between the residuals and supernova nuisance parameters after a linear correction is applied. When these other correlations are taken into account, the lensing signal is detected at 1.4sigma. We show for the first time that distance estimates from supernovae can be improved when lensing is incorporated by including a new parameter in the SALT2 methodology for determining distance moduli. The recovered value of the new parameter is consistent with the lensing prediction. Using CMB data from WMAP7, H0 data from HST and SDSS BAO measurements, we find the best-fit value of the new lensing parameter and show that the central values and uncertainties on Omega_m and w are unaffected. The lensing of supernovae, while only seen at marginal significance in this low redshift sample, will be of vital importance for the next generation of surveys, such as DES and LSST, which will be systematics dominated.
Baryons and cold dark matter (CDM) did not comove prior to recombination. This leads to differences in the local baryon and CDM densities, the so-called baryon-CDM isocurvature perturbations $delta_{bc}$. These perturbations are usually neglected in the analysis of Large-Scale Structure data but taking them into account might become important in the era of high precision cosmology. Using gravity-only 2-fluid simulations we assess the impact of such perturbations on the dark matter halos distribution. In particular, we focus on the baryon fraction in halos as a function of mass and large-scale $delta_{bc}$, which also allows us to study details of the nontrivial numerical setup required for such simulations. We further measure the cross-power spectrum between the halo field and $delta_{bc}$ over a wide range of mass. This cross-correlation is nonzero and negative which shows that halo formation is impacted by $delta_{bc}$. We measure the associated bias parameter $b_{delta_{bc}}$ and compare it to recent results, finding good agreement. Finally we quantify the impact of such perturbations on the halo-halo power spectrum and show that this effect can be degenerate with the one of massive neutrinos for surveys like DESI.
We present a new method for constructing three-dimensional mass maps from gravitational lensing shear data. We solve the lensing inversion problem using truncation of singular values (within the context of generalized least squares estimation) without a priori assumptions about the statistical nature of the signal. This singular value framework allows a quantitative comparison between different filtering methods: we evaluate our method beside the previously explored Wiener filter approaches. Our method yields near-optimal angular resolution of the lensing reconstruction and allows cluster sized halos to be de-blended robustly. It allows for mass reconstructions which are 2-3 orders-of-magnitude faster than the Wiener filter approach; in particular, we estimate that an all-sky reconstruction with arcminute resolution could be performed on a time-scale of hours. We find however that linear, non-parametric reconstructions have a fundamental limitation in the resolution achieved in the redshift direction.
We present a tomographic cosmological weak lensing analysis of the HST COSMOS Survey. Applying our lensing-optimized data reduction, principal component interpolation for the ACS PSF, and improved modelling of charge-transfer inefficiency, we measure a lensing signal which is consistent with pure gravitational modes and no significant shape systematics. We carefully estimate the statistical uncertainty from simulated COSMOS-like fields obtained from ray-tracing through the Millennium Simulation. We test our pipeline on simulated space-based data, recalibrate non-linear power spectrum corrections using the ray-tracing, employ photometric redshifts to reduce potential contamination by intrinsic galaxy alignments, and marginalize over systematic uncertainties. We find that the lensing signal scales with redshift as expected from General Relativity for a concordance LCDM cosmology, including the full cross-correlations between different redshift bins. For a flat LCDM cosmology, we measure sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^0.51=0.75+-0.08 from lensing, in perfect agreement with WMAP-5, yielding joint constraints Omega_m=0.266+0.025-0.023, sigma_8=0.802+0.028-0.029 (all 68% conf.). Dropping the assumption of flatness and using HST Key Project and BBN priors only, we find a negative deceleration parameter q_0 at 94.3% conf. from the tomographic lensing analysis, providing independent evidence for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. For a flat wCDM cosmology and prior w in [-2,0], we obtain w<-0.41 (90% conf.). Our dark energy constraints are still relatively weak solely due to the limited area of COSMOS. However, they provide an important demonstration for the usefulness of tomographic weak lensing measurements from space. (abridged)