Related papers: Mitigating Systematic Errors in Angular Correlatio…
Weak lensing can be observed through a number of effects on the images of distant galaxies; their shapes are sheared, their sizes and fluxes (magnitudes) are magnified and their positions on the sky are modified by the lensing field. Galaxy…
We investigate the impact of astrophysical systematics on cosmic shear cosmological parameter constraints from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS), and the concordance with cosmic microwave background measurements…
Weak gravitational lensing is now established as a powerful method to measure mass fluctuations in the universe. It relies on the measurement of small coherent distortions of the images of background galaxies. Even low-level correlations in…
In addition to the intrinsic clustering of galaxies themselves, the spatial distribution of galaxies observed in surveys is modulated by the presence of weak lensing due to matter in the foreground. This effect, known as magnification bias,…
Accurate reconstruction of the spatial distributions of the Point Spread Function (PSF) is crucial for high precision cosmic shear measurements. Nevertheless, current methods are not good at recovering the PSF fluctuations of high spatial…
We determine the accuracy of galaxy redshift distributions as estimated from photometric redshift probability distributions $p(z)$. Our method utilises measurements of the angular cross-correlation between photometric galaxies and an…
Here we present the results of various approaches to measure accurate colours and photometric redshifts (photo-z's) from wide-field imaging data. We use data from the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) which have been re-…
Gravitational lensing magnification is measured with a significance of 9.7 sigma on a large sample of galaxy clusters in the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). This survey covers ~154 deg^2 and contains over 18,000…
The weak gravitational lensing effect, small coherent distortions of galaxy images by means of a gravitational tidal field, can be used to study the relation between the matter and galaxy distribution. In this context, weak lensing has so…
Given the basic parameters of a cosmic shear weak lensing survey, how well can systematic errors due to anisotropy in the point spread function (PSF) be corrected? The largest source of error in this correction to date has been the…
Galaxy redshift surveys are subject to incompleteness and inhomogeneous sampling due to the various constraints inherent to spectroscopic observations. This can introduce systematic errors on the summary statistics of interest, which need…
Gravitational lensing magnification modifies the observed spatial distribution of galaxies and can severely bias cosmological probes of large-scale structure if not accurately modelled. Standard approaches to modelling this magnification…
We explore the ability of weak lensing surveys to locate massive clusters. We use both analytic models of dark matter halos and mock weak lensing surveys generated from a large cosmological N-body simulation. The analytic models describe…
The number density and correlation function of galaxies are two key quantities to characterize the distribution of the observed galaxy population. High-$z$ spectroscopic surveys, which usually involve complex target selection and are…
We identify and study a previously unknown systematic effect on cosmic shear measurements, caused by the selection of galaxies used for shape measurement, in particular the rejection of close (blended) galaxy pairs. We use ray-tracing…
Several recent cosmological analyses have found tension between constraints derived from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) data and those derived from other data sets, such as the Planck cosmic microwave…
It is well known that magnification bias, the modulation of galaxy or quasar source counts by gravitational lensing, can change the observed angular correlation function. We investigate magnification-induced changes to the shape of the…
Measuring the angular clustering of galaxies as a function of redshift is a powerful method for extracting information from the three-dimensional galaxy distribution. The precision of such measurements will dramatically increase with…
We analyze the density field of galaxies observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) included in the SDSS Data Release Nine (DR9). DR9 includes spectroscopic redshifts for over 400,000…
We investigate the effects of potential sources of systematic error on the angular and photometric redshift, z_phot, distributions of a sample of redshift 0.4 < z < 0.7 massive galaxies whose selection matches that of the Baryon Oscillation…