English

Mitigating Nonlinear Systematics in Weak Lensing Surveys II: Stability and Diagnostics with Intrinsic Alignment

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-12-23 v2

Abstract

The Bernardeau-Nishimichi-Taruya (BNT) transform provides a powerful framework for analysing tomographic cosmic shear data by improving the localization of shear correlations in physical scale. It operates by performing a linear combination of the shear data vector in \ell-space, yielding a transformed vector that is better localized in both redshift and kk-space. BNT is particularly useful for estimating cosmological parameters while minimizing the impact of poorly understood nonlinear physics, without discarding large amounts of information as is typically done with simple scale cuts. In our previous work, we showed that BNT outperforms traditional weak-lensing analyses; however, that study did not include intrinsic alignments (IA). In the present work, we assess the robustness of our BNT-based kk-cut framework in the presence of realistic IA models. We consider two cases: (i) when the assumed IA model used in sampling is close to, but not identical to, the true one, and (ii) when the assumed IA model is significantly biased compared to the true one. In the first case, the kk-cut framework yields precise and unbiased S8S_8 constraints even with limited knowledge of large-scale modes. Using Euclid-like mock data and a stringent kk-cut of k0.1  Mpc1k \le 0.1\;{\rm Mpc^{-1}} for all tomographic bins, we found that BNT can constrain S8S_8 with a precision better than 2\% while non-BNT has lost all constraining power. In the second case, the BNT transform serves as a powerful diagnostic tool, revealing internal inconsistencies in kk-space and redshift-space both exceeding 5σ\sigma when the functional form of the sampling and fiducial IA models differ fundamentally.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.09544,
  title  = {Mitigating Nonlinear Systematics in Weak Lensing Surveys II: Stability and Diagnostics with Intrinsic Alignment},
  author = {Shiming Gu and Ludovic van Waerbeke and Francis Bernardeau and Sébastien Fabbro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.09544},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages, 9 plots, comments welcome! Updated to the Phys. Rev. D Accepted version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:34:19.423Z