English

Propagating residual biases in masked cosmic shear power spectra

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-12-16 v2

Abstract

In this paper we derive a full expression for the propagation of weak lensing shape measurement biases into cosmic shear power spectra including the effect of missing data. We show using simulations that terms higher than first order in bias parameters can be ignored and the impact of biases can be captured by terms dependent only on the mean of the multiplicative bias field. We identify that the B-mode power contains information on the multiplicative bias. We find that without priors on the residual multiplicative bias δm\delta m and stochastic ellipticity variance σe\sigma_e that constraints on the amplitude of the cosmic shear power spectrum are completely degenerate, and that when applying priors the constrained amplitude AA is slightly biased low via a classic marginalisation paradox. Using all-sky Gaussian random field simulations we find that the combination of (1+2δm)A(1+2\delta m)A is unbiased for a joint EE and BB power spectrum likelihood if the error and mean (precision and accuracy) of the stochastic ellipticity variance is known to better than σ(σe)0.05\sigma(\sigma_e)\leq 0.05 and Δσe0.01\Delta\sigma_e\leq 0.01, or the multiplicative bias is known to better than σ(m)0.07\sigma(m)\leq 0.07 and Δm0.01\Delta m\leq 0.01.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.07749,
  title  = {Propagating residual biases in masked cosmic shear power spectra},
  author = {T. D. Kitching and A. C. Deshpande and P. L. Taylor},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.07749},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

12 pages, accepted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics, comments welcome