English

KiDS-Legacy: Redshift distributions and their calibration

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-11-19 v2

Abstract

We present the redshift calibration methodology and bias estimates for the cosmic shear analysis of the fifth and final data release (DR5) of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS). KiDS-DR5 includes a greatly expanded compilation of calibrating spectra, drawn from 2727 square degrees of dedicated optical and near-IR imaging taken over deep spectroscopic fields. The redshift distribution calibration leverages a range of new methods and updated simulations to produce the most precise N(z)N(z) bias estimates used by KiDS to date. Improvements to our colour-based redshift distribution measurement method (SOM) mean that we are able to use many more sources per tomographic bin for our cosmological analyses, and better estimate the representation of our source sample given the available spec-zz. We validate our colour-based redshift distribution estimates with spectroscopic cross-correlations (CC). We find that improvements to our cross-correlation redshift distribution measurement methods mean that redshift distribution biases estimated between the SOM and CC methods are fully consistent on simulations, and the data calibration is consistent to better than 2σ2\sigma in all tomographic bins.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.19440,
  title  = {KiDS-Legacy: Redshift distributions and their calibration},
  author = {Angus H. Wright and Hendrik Hildebrandt and Jan Luca van den Busch and Maciej Bilicki and Catherine Heymans and Benjamin Joachimi and Constance Mahony and Robert Reischke and Benjamin Stölzner and Anna Wittje and Marika Asgari and Nora Elisa Chisari and Andrej Dvornik and Christos Georgiou and Benjamin Giblin and Henk Hoekstra and Priyanka Jalan and Anjitha John William and Shahab Joudaki and Konrad Kuijken and Giorgio Francesco Lesci and Shun-Sheng Li and Laila Linke and Arthur Loureiro and Matteo Maturi and Lauro Moscardin and Lucas Porth and Mario Radovich and Tilman Tröster and Maximilian von Wietersheim-Kramsta and Ziang Yan and Mijin Yoon and Yun-Hao Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19440},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

26 pages, 18 figures, 8 tables, accepted for publication in A&A