No Arabic abstract
One of the most pernicious theoretical systematics facing upcoming gravitational lensing surveys is the uncertainty introduced by the effects of baryons on the power spectrum of the convergence field. One method that has been proposed to account for these effects is to allow several additional parameters (that characterize dark matter halos) to vary and to fit lensing data to these halo parameters concurrently with the standard set of cosmological parameters. We test this method. In particular, we use this technique to model convergence power spectrum predictions from a set of cosmological simulations. We estimate biases in dark energy equation of state parameters that would be incurred if one were to fit the spectra predicted by the simulations either with no model for baryons, or with the proposed method. We show that neglecting baryonic effect leads to biases in dark energy parameters that are several times the statistical errors for a survey like the Dark Energy Survey. The proposed method to correct for baryonic effects renders the residual biases in dark energy equation of state parameters smaller than the statistical errors. These results suggest that this mitigation method may be applied to analyze convergence spectra from a survey like the Dark Energy Survey. For significantly larger surveys, such as will be carried out by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the biases introduced by baryonic effects are much more significant. We show that this mitigation technique significantly reduces the biases for such larger surveys, but that a more effective mitigation strategy will need to be developed in order ensure that the residual biases in these surveys fall below the statistical errors.
We use 26 million galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 shape catalogs over 1321 deg$^2$ of the sky to produce the most significant measurement of cosmic shear in a galaxy survey to date. We constrain cosmological parameters in both the flat $Lambda$CDM and $w$CDM models, while also varying the neutrino mass density. These results are shown to be robust using two independent shape catalogs, two independent photoz calibration methods, and two independent analysis pipelines in a blind analysis. We find a 3.5% fractional uncertainty on $sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.782^{+0.027}_{-0.027}$ at 68% CL, which is a factor of 2.5 improvement over the fractional constraining power of our DES Science Verification results. In $w$CDM, we find a 4.8% fractional uncertainty on $sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.777^{+0.036}_{-0.038}$ and a dark energy equation-of-state $w=-0.95^{+0.33}_{-0.39}$. We find results that are consistent with previous cosmic shear constraints in $sigma_8$ -- $Omega_m$, and see no evidence for disagreement of our weak lensing data with data from the CMB. Finally, we find no evidence preferring a $w$CDM model allowing $w e -1$. We expect further significant improvements with subsequent years of DES data, which will more than triple the sky coverage of our shape catalogs and double the effective integrated exposure time per galaxy.
Owing to the mass-sheet degeneracy, cosmic shear maps do not probe directly the Fourier modes of the underlying mass distribution on scales comparable to the survey size and larger. To assess the corresponding effect on attainable cosmological parameter constraints, we quantify the information on super-survey modes in a lognormal model and, when interpreted as nuisance parameters, their degeneracies to cosmological parameters. Our analytical and numerical calculations clarify the central role of super-sample covariance (SSC) in shaping the statistical power of cosmological observables. Reconstructing the background modes from their non-Gaussian statistical dependence to small scales modes yields the renormalized convergence. This diagonalizes the spectrum covariance matrix, and the information content of the corresponding power spectrum is increased by a factor of two over standard methods. Unfortunately, careful calculation of the Cramer-Rao bound shows that the information recovery can never be made complete, any observable built from shear fields, including optimal sufficient statistics, are subject to severe information loss, typically $80%$ to $90%$ below $ell sim 3000$ for generic cosmological parameters. The lost information can only be recovered from additional, non-shear based data. Our predictions hold just as well for a tomographic analysis, and/or full sky surveys.
We present a tomographic cosmic shear study from the Deep Lens Survey (DLS), which, providing a limiting magnitude r_{lim}~27 (5 sigma), is designed as a pre-cursor Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) survey with an emphasis on depth. Using five tomographic redshift bins, we study their auto- and cross-correlations to constrain cosmological parameters. We use a luminosity-dependent nonlinear model to account for the astrophysical systematics originating from intrinsic alignments of galaxy shapes. We find that the cosmological leverage of the DLS is among the highest among existing >10 sq. deg cosmic shear surveys. Combining the DLS tomography with the 9-year results of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP9) gives Omega_m=0.293_{-0.014}^{+0.012}, sigma_8=0.833_{-0.018}^{+0.011}, H_0=68.6_{-1.2}^{+1.4} km/s/Mpc, and Omega_b=0.0475+-0.0012 for LCDM, reducing the uncertainties of the WMAP9-only constraints by ~50%. When we do not assume flatness for LCDM, we obtain the curvature constraint Omega_k=-0.010_{-0.015}^{+0.013} from the DLS+WMAP9 combination, which however is not well constrained when WMAP9 is used alone. The dark energy equation of state parameter w is tightly constrained when Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) data are added, yielding w=-1.02_{-0.09}^{+0.10} with the DLS+WMAP9+BAO joint probe. The addition of supernova constraints further tightens the parameter to w=-1.03+-0.03. Our joint constraints are fully consistent with the final Planck results and also the predictions of a LCDM universe.
We present measurements of cosmic shear two-point correlation functions (TPCFs) from Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC SSP) first-year data, and derived cosmological constraints based on a blind analysis. The HSC first-year shape catalog is divided into four tomographic redshift bins ranging from $z=0.3$ to 1.5 with equal widths of $Delta z =0.3$. The unweighted galaxy number densities in each tomographic bin are 5.9, 5.9, 4.3, and 2.4 arcmin$^{-2}$ from lower to higher redshifts, respectively. We adopt the standard TPCF estimators, $xi_pm$, for our cosmological analysis, given that we find no evidence of the significant B-mode shear. The TPCFs are detected at high significance for all ten combinations of auto- and cross-tomographic bins over a wide angular range, yielding a total signal-to-noise ratio of 19 in the angular ranges adopted in the cosmological analysis, $7<theta<56$ for $xi_+$ and $28<theta<178$ for $xi_-$. We perform the standard Bayesian likelihood analysis for cosmological inference from the measured cosmic shear TPCFs, including contributions from intrinsic alignment of galaxies as well as systematic effects from PSF model errors, shear calibration uncertainty, and source redshift distribution errors. We adopt a covariance matrix derived from realistic mock catalogs constructed from full-sky gravitational lensing simulations that fully account for survey geometry and measurement noise. For a flat $Lambda$ cold dark matter model, we find $S_8 equiv sigma_8sqrt{Omega_m/0.3}=0.804_{-0.029}^{+0.032}$, and $Omega_m=0.346_{-0.100}^{+0.052}$. We carefully check the robustness of the cosmological results against astrophysical modeling uncertainties and systematic uncertainties in measurements, and find that none of them has a significant impact on the cosmological constraints.
Higher-order, non-Gaussian aspects of the large-scale structure carry valuable information on structure formation and cosmology, which is complementary to second-order statistics. In this work we measure second- and third-order weak-lensing aperture-mass moments from CFHTLenS and combine those with CMB anisotropy probes. The third moment is measured with a significance of $2sigma$. The combined constraint on $Sigma_8 = sigma_8 (Omega_{rm m}/0.27)^alpha$ is improved by 10%, in comparison to the second-order only, and the allowed ranges for $Omega_{rm m}$ and $sigma_8$ are substantially reduced. Including general triangles of the lensing bispectrum yields tighter constraints compared to probing mainly equilateral triangles. Second- and third-order CFHTLenS lensing measurements improve Planck CMB constraints on $Omega_{rm m}$ and $sigma_8$ by 26% for flat $Lambda$CDM. For a model with free curvature, the joint CFHTLenS-Planck result is $Omega_{rm m} = 0.28 pm 0.02$ (68% confidence), which is an improvement of 43% compared to Planck alone. We test how our results are potentially subject to three astrophysical sources of contamination: source-lens clustering, the intrinsic alignment of galaxy shapes, and baryonic effects. We explore future limitations of the cosmological use of third-order weak lensing, such as the nonlinear model and the Gaussianity of the likelihood function.