The decomposition of the cosmic shear field into E- and B-mode is an important diagnostic in weak gravitational lensing. However, commonly used techniques to perform this separation suffer from mode-mixing on very small or very large scales. We introduce a new E-/B-mode decomposition of the cosmic shear two-point correlation on a finite interval. This new statistic is optimised for cosmological applications, by maximising the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and a figure of merit (FoM) based on the Fisher matrix of the cosmological parameters Omega_m and sigma_8.
We improve both S/N and FoM results substantially with respect to the recently introduced ring statistic, which also provides E-/B-mode separation on a finite angular range. The S/N (FoM) is larger by a factor of three (two) on angular scales between 1 and 220 arc minutes. In addition, it yields better results than for the aperture-mass dispersion <M_ap>^2, with improvements of 20% (10%) for S/N (FoM). Our results depend on the survey parameters, most importantly on the covariance of the two-point shear correlation function. Although we assume parameters according to the CFHTLS-Wide survey, our method and optimisation scheme can be applied easily to any given survey settings and observing parameters. Arbitrary quantities, with respect to which the E-/B-mode filter is optimised, can be defined, therefore generalising the aim and context of the new shear statistic.
A systematic study of projection biases in the Weak Lensing analysis of cosmic shear and the combination of galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing
Studying the statistical properties of the large-scale structure in the Universe with weak gravitational lensing is a prime goal of several current and forthcoming galaxy surveys. The power that weak lensing has to constrain cosmological parameters can be enhanced by considering statistics beyond second-order shear correlation functions or power spectra. One such higher-order probe that has proven successful in observational data is the density split statistics (DSS), in which one analyses the mean shear profiles around points that are classified according to their foreground galaxy density. I…
Gravitational weak lensing by dark matter halos leads to a measurable imprint in the shear correlation function of galaxies. Fuzzy dark matter (FDM), composed of ultralight axion-like particles of mass $m\sim 10^{-22}\text{ eV}$, suppresses the matter power spectrum and shear correlation with respect to standard cold dark matter. We model the effect of FDM on cosmic shear using the optimised halo model \textsc{HMCode}, accounting for additional suppression of the mass function and halo concentration in FDM as observed in $N$-body simulations. We combine Dark Energy Survey year 1 (DES-Y1) data …
One probe for systematic effects in gravitational lensing surveys is the presence of so-called B-modes in the cosmic shear two-point correlation functions ξ_\pm(\vt), since lensing is expected to produce only E-mode shear. Furthermore, there exist ambiguous modes which can not uniquely be assigned to either E- or B-mode shear. We derive explicit equations for the pure-mode shear correlation functions ξ_\pm^E/B(\vt) and their ambiguous components ξ_\pm^amb(\vt), that can be derived from the measured ξ_\pm(\vt) on a finite angular interval \tmin\le\vt\le\tmax, such that the latter can be decompo…
Upcoming surveys such as \LSST{} and \Euclid{} will significantly improve the power of weak lensing as a cosmological probe. To maximise the information that can be extracted from these surveys, it is important to explore novel statistics that complement standard weak lensing statistics such as the shear-shear correlation function and peak counts. In this work, we use a recently proposed weak lensing observable -- weak lensing voids -- to make parameter constraint forecasts for an LSST-like survey. We use the \cosmoslics{} $w$CDM simulation suite to measure void statistics as a function of cos…
