Weak Lensing for Precision Cosmology

By Rachel Mandelbaum. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2017

258 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weak gravitational lensing, the deflection of light by mass, is one of the best tools to constrain the growth of cosmic structure with time and reveal the nature of dark energy. I discuss the sources of systematic uncertainty in weak lensing measurements and their theoretical interpretation, including our current understanding and other options for future improvement. These include long-standing concerns such as the estimation of coherent shears from galaxy images or redshift distributions of galaxies selected on the basis of photometric redshifts, along with systematic uncertainties that have received less attention to date because they are subdominant contributors to the error budget in current surveys. I also discuss methods for automated systematics detection using survey data of the 2020s. The goal of this review is to describe the current state of the field and what must be done so that if weak lensing measurements lead toward surprising conclusions about key questions such as the nature of dark energy, those conclusions will be credible.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e8e58af86b5ca7f0674155e30f4ce2b788ef776

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Citations in the corpus

KiDS-1000 cosmology: Cosmic shear constraints and comparison between two point statistics (2020, background): “As all current cosmic shear analyses can already be considered systematics-limited to some degree (see Mandelbaum 2018 for a recent review of the major challenges), such benefits are likely to directly impact on the final cosmological constraints and could potentially outweigh a larger raw…”
Cosmological constraints from cosmic shear two-point correlation functions with HSC survey first-year data (2019, background): “3.2 TPCFs of shapes of PSF and residuals The PSF anisotropy induces additional deformation in galaxy shapes, which the shear estimation algorithm must correct for (see Mandelbaum 2018, for a review).”
Euclid preparation (2021, background): “Cosmic shear (see e.g., Kilbinger 2015; Mandelbaum 2018, for recent reviews), which is the coherent distortion of galaxy images by large-scale structures via weak gravitational lensing, offers the potential to measure w with great precision: The Euclid survey, in particular, aims at reaching 1%…”
COSMOS2020: A Panchromatic View of the Universe to z ∼ 10 from Two Complementary Catalogs (2021, methodology): “The COSMOS photo-z distribution is used as reference to establish the true redshift distribution in redshift slices in the Dark Energy Survey (DES; Troxel et al. 2018), a crucial component when estimating cosmological parameters with weak lensing (e.g., Mandelbaum 2018).”
KiDS+VIKING-450: Cosmic shear tomography with optical and infrared data (2018, background): “Weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure of the Universe (also known as cosmic shear; see Kilbinger 2015; Mandelbaum 2018, for reviews) is one of these probes that is currently making rapid progress with increasingly large, dedicated experiments coming online.”
KiDS+VIKING-450 and DES-Y1 combined: Cosmology with cosmic shear (2019, background): “The most notable systematic uncertainties pertain to the intrinsic alignment (IA) of galaxies, additive and multiplicative shear calibration, baryonic feedback affecting the nonlinear matter power spectrum, and photometric redshift errors (see Mandelbaum 2018 and references therein).”
Nuisance hardened data compression for fast likelihood-free inference (2019, background): “…alignments (Joachimi et al. 2015), shape and photo-z measurement systematics (Massey et al. 2012; Mandelbaum 2018; Salvato et al. 2018), blending (Mandelbaum 2018), reduced shear corrections (Krause & Hirata 2010), redshift-dependent galaxy-property distributions (Kannawadi et al. 2018),…”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Gravitational Lensing Map and Cosmological Parameters (2023, background): “While this expression is general (e.g., as appears in cosmic shear distortions of galaxy shapes, see Mandelbaum 2018), when the lensed light source is the CMB, the redshift distribution can be approximated as n(z) ' δD(z − z?)”
KiDS-1000 Cosmology: Multi-probe weak gravitational lensing and spectroscopic galaxy clustering constraints (2020, background): “The signal can also be scaled by both shear and photometric redshift measurement calibration errors (see Mandelbaum 2018, and references therein).”