We generalize ERA method of PSF correction for more realistic situations. The method re-smears the observed galaxy image(galaxy image smeared by PSF) and PSF image by an appropriate function called Re-Smearing Function(RSF) to make new images which h
ave the same ellipticity with the lensed (before smeared by PSF) galaxy image. It has been shown that the method avoids a systematic error arising from an approximation in the usual PSF correction in moment method such as KSB for simple PSF shape. By adopting an idealized PSF we generalize ERA method applicable for arbitrary PSF. This is confirmed with simulated complex PSF shapes. We also consider the effect of pixel noise and found that the effect causes systematic overestimation.
We present an analysis of the impact of the tree rings seen in the candidate sensors of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) on galaxy-shape measurements. The tree rings are a consequence of transverse electric fields caused by circularly symme
tric impurity gradients in the silicon of the sensors. They effectively modify the pixel area and shift the photogenerated charge around, displacing the observed photon positions. The displacement distribution generates distortions that cause spurious shears correlated with the tree-rings patterns, potentially biasing cosmic shear measurements. In this paper we quantify the amplitude of the spurious shear caused by the tree rings on the LSST candidate sensors, and calculate its 2-point correlation function. We find that 2-point correlation function of the spurious shear on an area equivalent to the LSST field of view is order of about $10^{-13}$, providing a negligible contribution to the 2-point correlation of the cosmic shear signal. Additional work is underway, and the final results and analysis will be published elsewhere (Okura et al. (2015), in prep.)
We developed a new method that uses ellipticity defined by 0th order moments (0th-ellipticity) for weak gravitational lensing shear analysis. Although there is a strong correlation between the ellipticity calculated using this approach and the usual
ellipticity defined by the 2nd order moment, the ellipticity calculated here has a higher signal-to-noise ratio because it is weighted to the central region of the image. These results were confirmed using data for Abell 1689 from the Subaru telescope. For shear analysis, we adopted the ellipticity of re-smeared artificial image (ERA) method for point spread function (PSF) correction, and we tested the precision of this 0th-ellipticity with simple simulation, then we obtained the same level of precision with the results of ellipticity defined by quadrupole moments. Thus, we can expect that weak lensing analysis using 0 shear will be improved in proportion to the statistical error.
We propose a new method for Point Spread Function (PSF) correction in weak gravitational lensing shear analysis using an artificial image with the same ellipticity as the lensed image. This avoids the systematic error associated with the approximatio
n in PSF correction used in previous approaches. We test the new method with simulated objects which have Gaussian or Cersic profiles smeared by a Gaussian PSF, and confirm that there is no systematic error.
This is the third paper on the improvements of systematic errors in our weak lensing analysis using an elliptical weight function, called E-HOLICs. In the previous papers we have succeeded in avoiding error which depends on ellipticity of background
image. In this paper, we investigate the systematic error which depends on signal to noise ratio of background image. We find that the origin of the error is the random count noise which comes from Poisson noise of sky counts. Random count noise makes additional moments and centroid shift error, and those 1st orders are canceled in averaging, but 2nd orders are not canceled. We derived the equations which corrects these effects in measuring moments and ellipticity of the image and test their validity using simulation image. We find that the systematic error becomes less than 1% in the measured ellipticity for objects with $S/N>3$.
We have developed a method for measuring higher-order weak lensing distortions of faint background galaxies, namely the weak gravitational flexion, by fully extending the Kaiser, Squires & Broadhurst method to include higher-order lensing image chara
cteristics (HOLICs) introduced by Okura, Umetsu, & Futamase. We take into account explicitly the weight function in calculations of noisy shape moments and the effect of higher-order PSF anisotropy, as well as isotropic PSF smearing. Our HOLICs formalism allows accurate measurements of flexion from practical observational data in the presence of non-circular, anisotropic PSF. We test our method using mock observations of simulated galaxy images and actual, ground-based Subaru observations of the massive galaxy cluster A1689 ($z=0.183$). From the high-precision measurements of spin-1 first flexion, we obtain a high-resolution mass map in the central region of A1689. The reconstructed mass map shows a bimodal feature in the central $4times 4$ region of the cluster. The major, pronounced peak is associated with the brightest cluster galaxy and central cluster members, while the secondary mass peak is associated with a local concentration of bright galaxies. The refined, high-resolution mass map of A1689 demonstrates the power of the generalized weak lensing analysis techniques for quantitative and accurate measurements of the weak gravitational lensing signal.
