English

Joint analysis of small-scale galaxy clustering and galaxy--galaxy lensing from BOSS galaxies

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-01-21 v1

Abstract

We present a joint analysis of galaxy clustering and galaxy--galaxy lensing measurements from BOSS galaxies using a simulation-based emulation method combined with a halo occupation distribution model. Our emulators are constructed with the Aemulus ν\nu simulations, a suite of wνw\nuCDM NN-body simulations with massive neutrinos as independent particle species. We combine small-scale analysis of clustering from 0.1h10.1h^{-1}Mpc to 60.2 h160.2~h^{-1}Mpc and lensing from 1.7h11.7h^{-1}Mpc to 60.2 h160.2~h^{-1}Mpc to perform cosmological constraints. We split the BOSS galaxies into three redshift bins to measure their clustering and employ galaxies from Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey and Hyper Suprime-Cam as source galaxies to measure lensing separately. We find that the addition of lensing significantly improves the constraining power on S8=σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5S_{8}=\sigma_8(\Omega_m/0.3)^{0.5}, with a weak improvement for fσ8f\sigma_{8}. Our results of fσ8f\sigma_{8} indicate tensions of around 14σ1\sim4\sigma below the results of CMB observations of Planck. For S8S_{8}, our results are also lower than Planck, and the tension can be mitigated when considering possible systematics in lensing measurement. As a byproduct, our analysis prefers a non-zero neutrino mass but without strong significance, with the constraining power dominated by the clustering. Given the accuracy and precision of our model and the observational data, it is anticipated that larger and higher-quality spectroscopic datasets will improve the constraints on this fundamental property in the near future.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.12976,
  title  = {Joint analysis of small-scale galaxy clustering and galaxy--galaxy lensing from BOSS galaxies},
  author = {Wenhao Gao and Zhenjie Liu and Zhongxu Zhai and Jeremy L. Tinker and Jun Zhang and Arka Banerjee and Joseph DeRose and Hong Guo and Yao-Yuan Mao and Kate Storey-Fisher and Risa H. Wechsler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12976},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables; accepted by ApJ