Photometric redshift analysis in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data
Abstract
We present results from a study of the photometric redshift performance of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), using the early data from a Science Verification (SV) period of observations in late 2012 and early 2013 that provided science-quality images for almost 200 sq.~deg.~at the nominal depth of the survey. We assess the photometric redshift performance using about 15000 galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts available from other surveys. These galaxies are used, in different configurations, as a calibration sample, and photo-'s are obtained and studied using most of the existing photo- codes. A weighting method in a multi-dimensional color-magnitude space is applied to the spectroscopic sample in order to evaluate the photo- performance with sets that mimic the full DES photometric sample, which is on average significantly deeper than the calibration sample due to the limited depth of spectroscopic surveys. Empirical photo- methods using, for instance, Artificial Neural Networks or Random Forests, yield the best performance in the tests, achieving core photo- resolutions . Moreover, the results from most of the codes, including template fitting methods, comfortably meet the DES requirements on photo- performance, therefore, providing an excellent precedent for future DES data sets.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1406.4407,
title = {Photometric redshift analysis in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data},
author = {C. Sánchez and M. Carrasco Kind and H. Lin and R. Miquel and F. B. Abdalla and A. Amara and M. Banerji and C. Bonnett and R. Brunner and D. Capozzi and A. Carnero and F. J. Castander and L. A. N. da Costa and C. Cunha and A. Fausti and D. Gerdes and N. Greisel and J. Gschwend and W. Hartley and S. Jouvel and O. Lahav and M. Lima and M. A. G. Maia and P. Martí and R. L. C. Ogando and F. Ostrovski and P. Pellegrini and M. M. Rau and I. Sadeh and S. Seitz and I. Sevilla-Noarbe and A. Sypniewski and J. de Vicente and T. Abbot and S. S. Allam and D. Atlee and G. Bernstein and J. P. Bernstein and E. Buckley-Geer and D. Burke and M. J. Childress and T. Davis and D. L. DePoy and A. Dey and S. Desai and H. T. Diehl and P. Doel and J. Estrada and A. Evrard and E. Fernández and D. Finley and B. Flaugher and E. Gaztanaga and K. Glazebrook and K. Honscheid and A. Kim and K. Kuehn and N. Kuropatkin and C. Lidman and M. Makler and J. L. Marshall and R. C. Nichol and A. Roodman and E. Sánchez and B. X. Santiago and M. Sako and R. Scalzo and R. C. Smith and M. E. C. Swanson and G. Tarle and D. Thomas and D. L. Tucker and S. A. Uddin and F. Valdés and A. Walker and F. Yuan and J. Zuntz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.4407},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
Published in MNRAS. This version accounts for minor comments in the journal review