Systematic errors in weak lensing: application to SDSS galaxy-galaxy weak lensing

By Rachel Mandelbaum, C. Hirata, Uros Seljak, J. Guzik, Nikhil Padmanabhan, C. Blake, M. Blanton, Robert Lupton, J. Brinkmann. 2005

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weak lensing is emerging as a powerful observational tool to constrain cosmological models, but is at present limited by an incomplete understanding of many sources of systematic error. Many of these errors are multiplicative and depend on the population of background galaxies. We show how the commonly cited geometric test, which is rather insensitive to cosmology, can be used as a ratio test of systematics in the lensing signal at the 1 per cent level. We apply this test to the galaxy-galaxy lensing analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which at present is the sample with the highest weak lensing signal-to-noise ratio and has the additional advantage of spectroscopic redshifts for lenses. This allows one to perform meaningful geometric tests of systematics for different subsamples of galaxies at different mean redshifts, such as brighter galaxies, fainter galaxies and high-redshift luminous red galaxies, both with and without photometric redshift estimates. We use overlapping objects between SDSS and the DEEP2 and 2df-Sloan LRG and Quasar (2SLAQ) spectroscopic surveys to establish accurate calibration of photometric redshifts and to determine the redshift distributions for SDSS. We use these redshift results to compute the projected surface density contrast ΔΣ around 259 609 spectroscopic galaxies in the SDSS; by measuring ΔΣ with different source samples we establish consistency of the results at the 10 per cent level (1σ). We also use the ratio test to constrain shear calibration biases and other systematics in the SDSS survey data to determine the overall galaxy-galaxy weak lensing signal calibration uncertainty. We find no evidence of any inconsistency among many subsamples of the data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f60c8cd2159652869d201734e567f05851cb95d0

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Citations in the corpus

The Shear Testing Programme – I. Weak lensing analysis of simulated ground-based observations (2005, background): “…only be directly detected through the cosmic shear analysis of image simulations, although see the discussion on self-calibration in Huterer et al. (2006) and Hirata et al. (2004) and Mandelbaum et al. (2005) for model-dependent estimates of shear calibration errors in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “3 flat ΛCDM cosmology and a pure CDM Ωm = 1 cosmology is only 1%! In early work (Mandelbaum et al., 2005) cosmography was therefore used as a test for shear systematics rather than a cosmological probe.”
GalSim: The modular galaxy image simulation toolkit (2014, methodology): “These routines were later tested, improved, and optimized in subsequent work (Mandelbaum et al., 2005, 2012; Reyes et al., 2012).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing shape catalogues (2017, methodology): “For the size, we use the scale size, σ , of the best-fitting elliptical Gaussian profile using the adaptive moments algorithm HSM (Mandelbaum et al. 2005).”
Constraints on intrinsic alignment contamination of weak lensing surveys using the MegaZ-LRG sample (2010, methodology): “To measure the intrinsic shears, we use PSF-corrected shape measurements from SDSS, specifically the galaxy ellipticity measurements by Mandelbaum et al. (2005), who obtained shapes for more than 30 million galaxies in the SDSS imaging data down to extinction-corrected model magnituder = 21.8 using…”
KiDS+VIKING-450: Cosmic shear tomography with optical and infrared data (2018, methodology): “We subtract the signal around random points with the same footprint on the sky as the lens samples (Mandelbaum et al. 2005; Singh et al. 2017).”
Measuring the galaxy–mass and galaxy–dust correlations through magnification and reddening (2009, methodology): “…mostly been accessible through galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements which estimate the mean tangential shear of background galaxies for a given sample of foreground lenses (e.g. Hoekstra et al. 2002, Sheldon et al. 2004, c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 Mandelbaum et al. 2005, Leauthaud et al. 2007).”
Mapping stellar content to dark matter haloes using galaxy clustering and galaxy–galaxy lensing in the SDSS DR7 (2015, methodology): “While some studies (Velander et al. 2014; Hudson et al. 2015) adopted the “tidally stripped” subhalo lensing model proposed in Mandelbaum et al. (2005), other studies (e.g., Leauthaud et al. 2012b; Coupon et al. 2015) ignored the lensing from subhalos, either based on the result of Yoo et al.…”
Detection of large-scale intrinsic ellipticity—density correlation from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and implications for weak lensing surveys (2005, methodology): “We also note that the effect seen here is related to the effect seen by correlating positions of a fainter set of galaxies with the position angles of lens galaxies in Mandelbaum et al. (2005b).”
The Shear TEsting Programme 2: Factors affecting high precision weak lensing analyses (2006, methodology): “The Reglens (RM) method consists of two parts: the SDSS dataprocessing pipeline PHOTO (Ivezić et al. 2004), followed by the reGaussianization pipeline (Hirata & Seljak 2003; Mandelbaum et al. 2005).”
THE SEVENTH DATA RELEASE OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2008, background): “PHOTOMETRY OF BRIGHT GALAXIES As described in the DR6 paper and Mandelbaum et al. (2005), systematic errors in the estimation of the sky near bright (r < 16) galaxies causes their fluxes and scale sizes to be underestimated and the number of neighboring objects to be suppressed.”
Galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing: a promising union to constrain cosmological parameters (2008, methodology): “…power spectrum, Pg,dm(k) = 4π ∫ ∞ 0 ξg,dm(r) sin(kr) kr r2 dr. (6) In order to compute this power spectrum, we follow Seljak (2000) and Guzik & Seljak (2001), and adopt the halo model, according to which all dark matter is partitioned over dark matter haloes (see also Mandelbaum et al. 2005b).”
Origins of weak lensing systematics, and requirements on future instrumentation (or knowledge of instrumentation) (2012, background): “…model of the PSF will inevitably be imperfect because it is obtained from noisy stars and must be interpolated to the position and colour of each galaxy (e.g. Hoekstra 2004; Mandelbaum et al. 2005; Jain, Jarvis & Bernstein 2006; Paulin-Henriksson, Réfrégier & Amara 2009; Cypriano et al. 2010).”
The Fourth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2005, background): “Astudy ofweak lensing in the SDSS imaging data (Mandelbaum et al. 2005) found a systematic, 5% decrease in the number density of faint objects within 9000 of bright (r < 18) galaxies.”
KiDS+GAMA : cosmology constraints from a joint analysis of cosmic shear, galaxy-galaxy lensing, and angular clustering (2017, background): “As demonstrated in Mandelbaum et al. (2005), this bias can easily be corrected by multiplying the lensing signal with a boost factor, which contains the overdensity of source galaxies as a function of projected radial distance to the lens.”
Density profiles of galaxy groups and clusters from SDSS galaxy–galaxy weak lensing (2006, methodology): “The brightest red galaxies have been shown to have small baryon fractions compared to fainter red galaxies and compared to typical blue galaxies (Mandelbaum et al. 2005d), so the effects of baryons on the DM profile are relatively small in this class of galaxies.”
COSMOS: Three-dimensional Weak Lensing and the Growth of Structure (2007, methodology): “This program has also sped the development of a next generation of even more accurate shear measurement methods (Bridle et al. 2002; Refregier & Bacon 2003; Bernstein & Jarvis 2002; Massey & Refregier 2005; Mandelbaum et al. 2005; Kuijken 2006; Nakajima & Bernstein 2007;Massey et al. 2006).”
Intrinsic alignments of SDSS-III BOSS LOWZ sample galaxies (2014, background): “Thus dividing by wrs accounts for any galaxies that are physically-associated with the lens but are accidentally included in the source sample, which would lower the lensing signal if left uncorrected (Sheldon et al. 2004; Mandelbaum et al. 2005).”