Weak lensing data follow a naturally skewed distribution, implying the data vector most likely yielded from a survey will systematically fall below its mean. Although this effect is qualitatively known from CMB-analyses, correctly accounting for it in weak lensing is challenging, as a direct transfer of the CMB results is quantitatively incorrect. While a previous study (Sellentin et al. 2018) focused on the magnitude of this bias, we here focus on the frequency of this bias, its scaling with redshift, and its impact on the signal-to-noise of a survey. Filtering weak lensing data with COSEBIs, we show that weak lensing likelihoods are skewed up until $\ell \approx 100$, whereas CMB-likelihoods Gaussianize already at $\ell \approx 20$. While COSEBI-compressed data on KiDS- and DES-like redshift- and angular ranges follow Gaussian distributions, we detect skewness at 6$σ$ significance for half of a Euclid- or LSST-like data set, caused by the wider coverage and deeper reach of these surveys. Computing the signal-to-noise ratio per data point, we show that precisely the data points of highest signal-to-noise are the most biased. Over all redshifts, this bias affects at least 10% of a survey's total signal-to-noise, at high redshifts up to 25%. The bias is accordingly expected to impact parameter inference. The bias can be handled by developing non-Gaussian likelihoods. Otherwise, it could be reduced by removing the data points of highest signal-to-noise.
Advances in upcoming weak lensing surveys pose new challenges for an accurate modeling of the lensing observables. The wide sky coverage of Euclid makes angular scales down to $l_\mathrm{min}=10$ accessible. At such large angular scales, general relativistic effects manifest themselves, and the lensing magnification cannot be correctly described by the standard lensing convergence only. The impact of line-of-sight velocities on the magnification angular power spectrum, referred to as the Doppler magnification, is already well recognized in literature. In particular, it was suggested that the D…
We derive the essentials of the skewed weak lensing likelihood via a simple Hierarchical Model. Our likelihood passes four objective and cosmology-independent tests which a standard Gaussian likelihood fails. We demonstrate that sound weak lensing analyses are naturally biased low, and this does not indicate any new physics such as deviations from $Λ$CDM. Mathematically, the biases arise because noisy two-point functions follow skewed distributions. This form of bias is already known from CMB analyses, where the low multipoles have asymmetric error bars. Weak lensing is more strongly affected …
The rapidly improving precision of measurements of gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) also requires a corresponding increase in the precision of theoretical modeling. A commonly made approximation is to model the CMB deflection angle or lensing potential as a Gaussian random field. In this paper, however, we analytically quantify the influence of the non-Gaussianity of large-scale structure lenses, arising from nonlinear structure formation, on CMB lensing measurements. In particular, evaluating the impact of the non-zero bispectrum of large-scale structure on the r…
Impact of projection-induced optical selection bias on the weak lensing mass calibration of galaxy clusters
Boise State University（博伊西州立大学）；Southern Methodist University（南方卫理公会大学）；Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT), UAM–CSIC（马德里自治大学-西班牙国家研究委员会理论物理研究所）；Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
We propose a novel bias-free method for reconstructing the power spectrum of the weak lensing deflection field from cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations. The proposed method is in contrast to the standard method of CMB lensing reconstruction where a reconstruction bias needs to be subtracted to estimate the lensing power spectrum. This bias depends very sensitively on the modeling of the signal and noise properties of the survey, and a misestimate can lead to significantly inaccurate results. Our method obviates this bias and hence the need to characterize the detailed noise properti…
We present new methods for lensing reconstruction from CMB temperature fluctuations which have smaller mean-field and reconstruction noise bias corrections than current lensing estimators, with minimal loss of signal-to-noise. These biases are usually corrected using Monte Carlo simulations, and to the extent that these simulations do not perfectly mimic the underlying sky there are uncertainties in the bias corrections. The bias-hardened estimators which we present can have reduced sensitivity to such uncertainties, and provide a desirable cross-check on standard results. To test our approach…
Extragalactic foregrounds are known to constitute a limiting systematic in temperature-based CMB lensing with AdvACT, SPT-3G, Simons Observatory and CMB S4. Furthermore, since these foregrounds are emitted at cosmological distances, they are also themselves lensed. The correlation between this foreground lensing and CMB lensing causes an additional bias in CMB lensing estimators. In this paper, we quantify for the first time this "lensed foreground bias" for the standard CMB lensing quadratic estimator, the CMB shear and the CMB magnification estimators, in the case of Simons Observatory and i…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the brightness and size thresholds, cosmic shear experiments suffer from lensing bias. We calculate the effect on the shear power spectrum and show that - unless corrected for - it will lead analysts to cosmological parameters estimates that are biased at the 2-3σlevel in DETF Stage III experiments, such as the Dark Energy Survey.
Polarization data will soon provide the best avenue for measurements of the CMB lensing potential, although it is potentially sensitive to several instrumental effects including beam asymmetry, polarization angle uncertainties, sky coverage, as well as analysis choices such as masking. We derive "bias-hardened" lensing estimators to mitigate these effects, at the expense of somewhat larger reconstruction noise, and test them numerically on simulated data. We find that the mean-field bias from masking is significant for the EE quadratic lensing estimator, however the bias-hardened estimator com…
An excess up-scattering mass bias on a weak lensing cluster mass estimate is a statistical bias that an observed weak lensing mass ($M_{\rm obs}$) of a cluster of galaxies is, in a statistical sense, larger than its true mass ($M_{\rm true}$) because of a higher chance of up-scattering than that of down-scattering due to random noises in a weak lensing cluster shear profile. This non-symmetric scattering probability is caused by a monotonically decreasing cluster mass function with increasing mass. We examine this bias (defined by $b=M_{\rm obs}/M_{\rm true}$) in weak lensing shear-selected cl…
Cosmological constraints from current and upcoming galaxy cluster surveys are limited by the accuracy of cluster mass calibration. In particular, optically identified galaxy clusters are prone to selection effects that can bias the weak lensing mass calibration. We investigate the selection bias of the stacked cluster lensing signal associated with optically selected clusters, using clusters identified by the redMaPPer algorithm in the Buzzard simulations as a case study. We find that at a given cluster halo mass, the residuals of redMaPPer richness and weak lensing signal are positively corre…
Extragalactic foregrounds in temperature maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) severely limit the ability of standard estimators to reconstruct the weak lensing potential. These foregrounds are not fully removable by multi-frequency cleaning or masking and can lead to large biases if not properly accounted for. For foregrounds made of a number of unclustered point sources, an estimator for the source amplitude can be derived and deprojected, removing any bias to the lensing reconstruction. We show with simulations that all of the extragalactic foregrounds in temperature can be approxim…
Weak gravitational lensing has the potential to constrain cosmological parameters to high precision. However, as shown by the Shear TEsting Programmes (STEP) and GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing (GREAT) Challenges, measuring galaxy shears is a nontrivial task: various methods introduce different systematic biases which have to be accounted for. We investigate how pixel noise on the image affects the bias on shear estimates from a Maximum-Likelihood forward model-fitting approach using a sum of co-elliptical Sérsic profiles, in complement to the theoretical approach of an an associated pa…
The power spectrum of reconstructed cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing maps is a powerful tool for constraints on cosmological parameters like the sum of the neutrino masses and the dark energy equation of state. One possible complication is the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, due to the scattering of CMB photons by moving electrons, which can bias the reconstruction of the CMB lensing power spectrum through both kSZ-lensing correlations and the non-Gaussianity of the kSZ temperature anisotropies. We investigate for the first time the bias to CMB lensing reconstruction from t…
Weak-lensing measurements of the masses of galaxy clusters are commonly based on the assumption of spherically symmetric density profiles. Yet, the cold dark matter model predicts the shapes of dark matter halos to be triaxial. Halo triaxiality, and the orientation of the major axis with respect to the line of sight, are expected to be the leading cause of intrinsic scatter in weak-lensing mass measurements. The shape of central cluster galaxies (Brightest Cluster Galaxies; BCGs) is expected to follow the shape of the dark matter halo. Here we investigate the use of BCG ellipticity as predicto…
The use of large, X-ray selected galaxy cluster catalogues for cosmological analyses requires a thorough understanding of the X-ray mass estimates. Weak gravitational lensing is an ideal method to shed light on such issues, due to its insensitivity to the cluster dynamical state. We perform a weak lensing calibration of 166 galaxy clusters from the REFLEX and BCS cluster catalogue and compare our results to the X-ray masses based on scaled luminosities from that catalogue. To interpret the weak lensing signal in terms of cluster masses, we compare the lensing signal to simple theoretical Navar…
The lensing power spectrum from cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps will be measured with unprecedented precision with upcoming experiments, including upgrades to ACT and SPT. Achieving significant improvements in cosmological parameter constraints, such as percent level errors on sigma_8 and an uncertainty on the total neutrino mass of approximately 50 meV, requires percent level measurements of the CMB lensing power. This necessitates tight control of systematic biases. We study several types of biases to the temperature-based lensing reconstruction signal from foreground sour…
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is expected to be amongst the most powerful cosmological tools for ongoing and upcoming CMB experiments. In this work, we investigate a bias to CMB lensing reconstruction from temperature anisotropies due to the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, that is, the Doppler shift of CMB photons induced by Compton-scattering off moving electrons. The kSZ signal yields biases due to both its own intrinsic non-Gaussianity and its non-zero cross-correlation with the CMB lensing field (and other fields that trace the large-scale struct…
We investigate the expected cosmological constraints from a combination of weak lensing and large-scale galaxy clustering using realistic redshift distributions. Introducing a systematic bias in the weak lensing redshift distributions (of 0.05 in redshift) produces a $>2σ$ bias in the recovered matter power spectrum amplitude and dark energy equation of state, for preliminary Stage III surveys. We demonstrate that these cosmological errors can be largely removed by marginalising over unknown biases in the assumed weak lensing redshift distributions, if we assume high quality redshift informati…
We investigate the impact of non-Gaussian lensing deflections on measurements of the CMB lensing power spectrum. We find that the false assumption of their Gaussianity significantly biases these measurements in current and future experiments at the percent level. The bias is detected by comparing CMB lensing reconstructions from simulated CMB data lensed with Gaussian deflection fields to reconstructions from simulations lensed with fully non-Gaussian deflection fields. The non-Gaussian deflections are produced by ray-tracing through snapshots of an N-body simulation and capture both the non-G…
In this paper, we investigate whether galaxy assembly bias can reconcile the 20-40% disagreement between the observed galaxy projected clustering signal and the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal in the BOSS CMASS galaxy sample reported in Leauthaud et al. (2017). We use the suite of AbacusCosmos Lamda-CDM simulations at Planck best-fit cosmology and two flexible implementations of extended halo occupation distribution (HOD) models that incorporate galaxy assembly bias to build forward models and produce joint fits of the observed galaxy clustering signal and the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal. We fin…
Subject of this paper is the weak lensing effect on galaxies that show intrinsically correlated ellipticities. In our model, we investigate the distortion of the ellipticity field if the galaxies experience an apparent shift in their position by weak lensing deflection and compare this effect to the shearing effect induced by tidal fields. Starting with a derivation of intrinsic ellipticity spectra by employing a tidal torquing model generating galactic angular momenta, we model the galaxy ellipticity by assuming that the galactic disk forms perpendicularly to the host halo angular momentum di…
Reconstructed maps of the lensing convergence of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will play a major role in precision cosmology in coming years. CMB lensing maps will enable calibration of the masses of high-redshift galaxy clusters and will yield precise measurements of the growth of cosmic structure through cross-correlations with galaxy surveys. During the next decade, CMB lensing reconstruction will rely heavily on temperature data, rather than polarization, thus necessitating a detailed understanding of biases due to extragalactic foregrounds. In the near term, the most significant b…
Cross-correlating the lensing signals of galaxies and comic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations is expected to provide valuable cosmological information. In particular it may help tighten constraints on parameters describing the properties of intrinsically aligned galaxies at high redshift. To access the information conveyed by the cross-correlation signal its accurate theoretical description is required. We compute the bias to CMB lensing-galaxy shape cross-correlation measurements induced by nonlinear structure growth. Using tree-level perturbation theory for the large-scale structure bi…
The effect of ionized gas on the propagation of radio signals is known as plasma lensing. Unlike gravitational lensing, plasma lensing causes both magnification and strong de-magnification effects to background sources. We study the cross section of plasma lensing for two density profiles, the Gaussian and power-law models. In general, the cross section increases with the density gradient. Radio sources can be used to measure the free electron density along the line of sight. However, plasma lensing de-magnification causes an underestimate of the electron density. Such a bias increases with th…
We quantify the performance of a non-linear Wiener filter, constructed in wavelet space, at recovering some of the Fisher information that was lost in the weak lensing convergence field. The proposed method consists in a separation of the original field into the sum of a Gaussian and a non-Gaussian contribution. After filtering an ensemble of such fields, which are obtained from $N$-body simulations, we find that we can recapture about four times more Fisher information, an effect that can potentially improve by a significant amount the constraining power of weak lensing surveys on cosmologica…
We investigate a physical, composite alignment model for both spiral and elliptical galaxies and its impact on cosmological parameter estimation from weak lensing for a tomographic survey. Ellipticity correlation functions and angular ellipticity spectra for spiral and elliptical galaxies are derived on the basis of tidal interactions with the cosmic large-scale structure and compared to the tomographic weak lensing signal. We find that elliptical galaxies cause a contribution to the weak-lensing dominated ellipticity correlation on intermediate angular scales between $\ell\simeq40$ and $\ell\…
In the current era of high-precision CMB experiments, the imprint of gravitational lensing on the CMB temperature is exploited as a source of valuable information. Especially the reconstruction of the lensing potential power spectrum is of great interest. The reconstruction from the optimal quadratic estimator of the lensing potential, though, is biased. As long as the intrinsic CMB fluctuations are Gaussian this bias is well understood and controlled. In the presence of non-Gaussian primordial curvature perturbations, however, the CMB also acquires a non-Gaussian structure mimicking the lensi…
Subject of this paper are intrinsic ellipticity correlations between galaxies, their statistical properties, their observability with future surveys and their interference with weak gravitational lensing measurements. Using an angular momentum-based, quadratic intrinsic alignment model we derive correlation functions of the ellipticity components and project them to yield the four non-zero angular ellipticity spectra $C^ε_E(\ell)$, $C^ε_B(\ell)$, $C^ε_C(\ell)$ and $C^ε_S(\ell)$ in their generalisation to tomographic surveys. For a Euclid-like survey, these spectra would have amplitudes smaller…
Galaxies are biased tracers of the matter density on cosmological scales. For future tests of galaxy models, we refine and assess a method to measure galaxy biasing as function of physical scale $k$ with weak gravitational lensing. This method enables us to reconstruct the galaxy bias factor $b(k)$ as well as the galaxy-matter correlation $r(k)$ on spatial scales between $0.01\,h\,{\rm Mpc^{-1}}\lesssim k\lesssim10\,h\,{\rm Mpc^{-1}}$ for redshift-binned lens galaxies below redshift $z\lesssim0.6$. In the refinement, we account for an intrinsic alignment of source ellipticities, and we correct…
We systematically derive full-sky formulae for the weak lensing power spectra generated by scalar, vector and tensor perturbations from the total angular momentum (TAM) method. Based on both the geodesic and geodesic deviation equations, we first give the gauge-invariant expressions for the deflection angle and Jacobi map as observables of the CMB lensing and cosmic shear experiments. We then apply the TAM method, originally developed in the theoretical studies of CMB, to a systematic derivation of the angular power spectra. The TAM representation, which characterizes the total angular depende…
The magnification of galaxies in modern galaxy surveys induces additional correlations in the cosmic shear, galaxy-galaxy lensing and clustering observables used in modern lensing "3x2pt" analyses, due to sample selection. In this paper, we emulate the magnification contribution to all three observables utilising the SLICS simulations suite, and test the sensitivity of the cosmological model, galaxy bias and redshift distribution calibration to un-modelled magnification in a Stage-IV-like survey using Monte-Carlo sampling. We find that magnification cannot be ignored in any single or combined …
Extragalactic foregrounds are known to generate significant biases in temperature-based CMB lensing reconstruction. Several techniques, which include ``source hardening'' and ``shear-only estimators'' have been proposed to mitigate contamination and have been shown to be very effective at reducing foreground-induced biases. Here we extend both techniques to polarization, which will be an essential component of CMB lensing reconstruction for future experiments, and investigate the ``large-lens'' limit analytically to gain insight on the origin and scaling of foreground biases, as well as the se…
A key challenge for current and upcoming CMB lensing measurements is their sensitivity to biases from extragalactic foregrounds, such as Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signals or cosmic infrared background emission. Several methods have been developed to mitigate these lensing foreground biases, dividing broadly into multi-frequency cleaning approaches and modifications to the estimator geometry, but how to optimally combine these methods has not yet been explored in detail. In this paper, we examine which combination of lensing foreground mitigation strategies is best able to reduce the impact of for…
The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect produces a secondary temperature anisotropy of CMB. The main contribution comes from z<2, where dark energy leads to a decay of potentials. As the same photons are gravitationally lensed by these decaying potentials, there exists a high degree of correlation between the ISW effect and CMB lensing, leading to a non-zero three-point correlation (bispectrum) of the observed temperature anisotropy. This ISW-lensing bispectrum, whose shape resembles that of the so-called "local-form" primordial bispectrum parametrized by fNL, is known to be the largest contam…
Compensated isocurvature perturbations are opposite spatial fluctuations in the baryon and dark matter (DM) densities. They arise in the curvaton model and some models of baryogenesis. While the gravitational effects of baryon fluctuations are compensated by those of DM, leaving no observable impacts on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at first order, they modulate the sound horizon at recombination, thereby correlating CMB anisotropies at different multipoles. As a result, CIPs can be reconstructed using quadratic estimators similarly to CMB detection of gravitational lensing. Because of…
Compensated isocurvature perturbations (CIPs) are modes in which the baryon and dark matter density fluctuations cancel. They arise in the curvaton scenario as well as some models of baryogenesis. While they leave no observable effects on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at linear order, they do spatially modulate two-point CMB statistics and can be reconstructed in a manner similar to gravitational lensing. Due to the similarity between the effects of CMB lensing and CIPs, lensing contributes nearly Gaussian random noise to the CIP estimator that approximately doubles the reconstruction …
Highly precise weak lensing shear measurement is required for statistical weak gravitational lensing analysis such as cosmic shear measurement to achieve severe constraint on the cosmological parameters. For this purpose, the accurate shape measurement of background galaxies is absolutely important in which any systematic error in the measurement should be carefully corrected. One of the main systematic error comes from photon noise which is Poisson noise of flux from the atmosphere(noise bias). We investigate how the photon noise makes a systematic error in shear measurement within the framew…
Large catalogs of shear-selected peaks have recently become a reality. In order to properly interpret the abundance and properties of these peaks, it is necessary to take into account the effects of the clustering of source galaxies, among themselves and with the lens. In addition, the preferred selection of lensed galaxies in a flux- and size-limited sample leads to fluctuations in the apparent source density which correlate with the lensing field (lensing bias). In this paper, we investigate these issues for two different choices of shear estimators which are commonly in use today: globally-…
We estimate the amplitude of the source-lens clustering bias and of the intrinsic-alignment bias of weak lensing estimators of the two-point and three-point convergence and cosmic-shear correlation functions. We use a linear galaxy bias model for the galaxy-density correlations, as well as a linear intrinsic-alignment model. For the three-point and four-point density correlations, we use analytical or semi-analytical models, based on a hierarchical ansatz or a combination of one-loop perturbation theory with a halo model. For two-point statistics, we find that the source-lens clustering bias i…
Weak gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is an important cosmological tool that allows us to learn about the structure, composition and evolution of the Universe. Upcoming CMB experiments, such as the Simons Observatory (SO), will provide high-resolution and low-noise CMB measurements. We consider the impact of instrumental systematics on the corresponding high-precision lensing reconstruction power spectrum measurements. We simulate CMB temperature and polarization maps for an SO-like instrument and potential scanning strategy, and explore systematics relating to be…
A promising way to measure the distribution of matter on small scales (k ~ 10 hMpc^-1) is to use gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). CMB-HD, a proposed high-resolution, low-noise millimeter survey over half the sky, can measure the CMB lensing auto spectrum on such small scales enabling measurements that can distinguish between a cold dark matter (CDM) model and alternative models designed to solve problems with CDM on small scales. However, extragalactic foregrounds can bias the CMB lensing auto spectrum if left untreated. We present a foreground mitigation strateg…
We constrain the redshift dependence of gas pressure bias $\left\langle b_{y} P_{\mathrm{e}}\right\rangle$ (bias-weighted average electron pressure), which characterises the thermodynamics of intergalactic gas, through a combination of cross-correlations between galaxy positions and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect, as well as galaxy positions and the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The galaxy sample is from the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS). The tSZ $y$ map and the CMB lensing map are from the {\textit{Planck}} 2015 and 2018 dat…
We consider the bias introduced by a spatially-varying multiplicative shear bias (m-bias) on tomographic cosmic shear angular power spectra. To compute the bias in the power spectra, we estimate the mode-coupling matrix associated with an m-bias map using a computationally-efficient pseudo-Cl method. This allows us to consider the effect of the m-bias to high l. We then conduct a Fisher matrix analysis to forecast resulting biases in cosmological parameters. For a Euclid-like survey with a spatially-varying m-bias, with zero mean and rms of 0.01, we find that parameter biases reach a maximum o…
We investigate three-point statistics in weak lensing convergence, through the integrated bispectrum. This statistic involves measuring power spectra in patches, and is thus easy to measure, and avoids the complexity of estimating the very large number of possible bispectrum configurations. The integrated bispectrum principally probes the squeezed limit of the bispectrum. To be useful as a set of summary statistics, accurate theoretical predictions of the signal are required, and, assuming Gaussian sampling distributions, the covariance matrix. In this paper, we investigate through simulations…
Weak gravitational lensing of the CMBR manifests as a secondary anisotropy in the temperature maps. The effect, quantified through the shear and convergence fields imprint the underlying large scale structure (LSS), geometry and evolution history of the Universe. It is hence perceived to be an important observational probe of cosmology. De-lensing the CMBR temperature maps is also crucial for detecting the gravitational wave generated B-modes. Future observations of redshifted 21-cm radiation from the cosmological neutral hydrogen (HI) distribution hold the potential of probing the LSS over a …
To measure the mass of foreground objects with weak gravitational lensing, one needs to estimate the redshift distribution of lensed background sources. This is commonly done in an empirical fashion, i.e. with a reference sample of galaxies of known spectroscopic redshift, matched to the source population. In this work, we develop a simple decision tree framework that, under the ideal conditions of a large, purely magnitude-limited reference sample, allows an unbiased recovery of the source redshift probability density function p(z), as a function of magnitude and color. We use this framework …
As recently shown by Viola et al., the common (KSB) method for measuring weak gravitational shear creates a non-linear relation between the measured and the true shear of objects. We investigate here what effect such a non-linear calibration relation may have on cosmological parameter estimates from weak lensing if a simpler, linear calibration relation is assumed. We show that the non-linear relation introduces a bias in the shear-correlation amplitude and thus a bias in the cosmological parameters Omega_matter and sigma_8. Its direction and magnitude depends on whether the point-spread funct…
We demonstrate the utility and constraining power of a new statistic for investigating galaxy bias: the galaxy-lensing phase difference. The statistic consists in taking the differences of the phases of the harmonic wave-modes between the weak lensing convergence field and the galaxy count field. We use dark matter simulations populated with galaxies up to redshift $z=1$ to test the performance of this estimator. We find that phase differences are sensitive to the absolute value of the second order bias ($c_2=b_2/b_1$), and demonstrate why this is the case. For a $\sim$1500 sq. deg. galaxy sur…
We estimate the impact of weak lensing by strongly nonlinear cosmological structures on the cosmic microwave background. Accurate calculation of large $\ell$ multipoles requires N-body simulations and ray-tracing schemes with both high spatial and temporal resolution. To this end we have developed a new code that combines a gravitational Adaptive Particle-Particle, Particle-Mesh (AP3M) solver with a weak lensing evaluation routine. The lensing deviations are evaluated while structure evolves during the simulation so that all evolution steps--rather than just a few outputs--are used in the lens…
Yes! Upcoming galaxy shear surveys have the potential to significantly improve our understanding of dark energy and neutrino mass if lensing systematics can be sufficiently controlled. The cross-correlations between the weak lensing shear, galaxy number counts from a galaxy redshift survey, and the CMB lensing convergence can be used to calibrate the shear multiplicative bias, one of the most challenging systematics in lensing surveys. These cross-correlations can significantly reduce the deleterious effects of the uncertainties in multiplicative bias.
We estimate the bias on weak lensing mass measurements of shear-selected galaxy cluster samples. The mass bias is expected to be significant because constructions of cluster samples from peaks in weak lensing mass maps and measurements of cluster masses from their tangential shear profiles share the same noise. We quantify this mass bias from large sets of mock cluster samples with analytical density profiles and realistic large-scale structure noise from ray-tracing simulations. We find that, even for peaks with signal-to-noise ratio larger than $4.0$ in weak lensing mass maps constructed in …
We investigate possible signatures of halo assembly bias for spectroscopically selected galaxy groups from the GAMA survey using weak lensing measurements from the spatially overlapping regions of the deeper, high-imaging-quality photometric KiDS survey. We use GAMA groups with an apparent richness larger than 4 to identify samples with comparable mean host halo masses but with a different radial distribution of satellite galaxies, which is a proxy for the formation time of the haloes. We measure the weak lensing signal for groups with a steeper than average and with a shallower than average s…
Cosmological inference from cluster number counts is systematically limited by the accuracy of the mass calibration, i.e. the empirical determination of the mapping between cluster selection observables and halo mass. In this work we demonstrate a method to quantitatively determine the bias and uncertainties in weak-lensing mass calibration. To this end, we extract a library of projected matter density profiles from hydrodynamical simulations. Accounting for shear bias and noise, photometric redshift uncertainties, mis-centering, cluster member contamination, cluster morphological diversity, a…
