Related papers: Chasing the peak: optimal statistics for weak shea…
Cosmic shear estimation is an essential scientific goal for large galaxy surveys. It refers to the coherent distortion of distant galaxy images due to weak gravitational lensing along the line of sight. It can be used as a tracer of the…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys are rapidly becoming important tools to probe directly the mass density fluctuations in the universe and its background dynamics. Earlier studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of…
Galaxy-galaxy weak lensing provides a powerful means of measuring the average matter distribution around lens galaxies -- i.e., the galaxy bias relation. Properly accounting for the spin-2 nature of weak lensing distortions, we develop a…
Intrinsic alignments of galaxies are recognised as one of the most important systematic in weak lensing surveys on small angular scales. In this paper we investigate ellipticity correlation functions that are measured separately on…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly measure the distribution of mass in the universe. Because the distortions induced by lensing in the shape of background galaxies are small, the measurement of weak lensing…
The Bayesian gravitational shear estimation algorithm developed by Bernstein and Armstrong (2014) can potentially be used to overcome multiplicative noise bias and recover shear using very low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) galaxy images. In…
We apply a mass reconstruction technique to simulated large-scale structure gravitational distortion maps, from 2.5' to 10 degree scales, for different cosmological scenarii. The projected mass is reconstructed using a non-parametric least…
The robust estimation of the tiny distortions (shears) of galaxy shapes caused by weak gravitational lensing in the presence of much larger shape distortions due to the point-spread function (PSF) has been widely investigated. One major…
We analyse the first measurements from precision weak lensing (PWL): a new methodology for measuring individual galaxy-galaxy weak lensing through velocity information. Our goal is to understand the observed shear distribution from PWL,…
Shear estimation bias from galaxy detection and blending identification is now recognized as an issue for ongoing and future weak lensing surveys. Currently, the empirical approach to correcting for this bias involves numerically shearing…
We study the effects of ellipticity in lens galaxies and external tidal shear from neighboring objects on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses. For isothermal lens galaxies normalized so that the Einstein radius is independent of…
We investigate biases induced by the conversion between the observed image shape to shear distortion in current weak lensing analysis methods. Such overall calibration biases cannot be detected by the standard tests such as E/B…
Weak lensing measurements are entering a precision era to statistically map the distribution of matter in the universe. The most common measurement has been of the variance of the projected surface density of matter, which corresponds to…
Current optical imaging surveys for cosmology are covering large areas of sky. To exploit the statistical power of these surveys for weak lensing measurements requires shape measurement methods with subpercent systematic errors. We…
We derive expressions, in terms of "polar shapelets", for the image distortion operations associated with weak gravitational lensing. Shear causes galaxy shapes to become elongated, and is sensitive to the second derivative of the projected…
We develop and test a method for measuring the gravitational lensing induced distortion of faint background galaxies. We first describe how we locate the galaxies and measure a 2-component `polarisation' or ellipticity statistic $e_\alpha$…
We present new tests to identify stationary position-dependent additive shear biases in weak gravitational lensing data sets. These tests are important diagnostics for currently ongoing and planned cosmic shear surveys, as such biases…
Weak gravitational lensing measurements based on photometry are limited by shape noise, the variance in the unknown unlensed orientations of the source galaxies. If the source is a disk galaxy with a well-ordered velocity field, however,…
Cosmic shear is a powerful probe of cosmological parameters, but its potential can be fully utilised only if galaxy shapes are measured with great accuracy. Two major effects have been identified which are likely to account for most of the…
Point estimators for the shearing of galaxy images induced by gravitational lensing involve a complex inverse problem in the presence of noise, pixelization, and model uncertainties. We present a probabilistic forward modeling approach to…