Related papers: Cosmic shear as a tool for precision cosmology: mi…
Weak lensing by large scale structure or 'cosmic shear' is a potentially powerful cosmological probe to shed new light on Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Modified Gravity. It is based on the weak distortions induced by large-scale structures…
Weak gravitational lensing is responsible for the shearing and magnification of the images of high-redshift sources due to the presence of intervening matter. The distortions are due to fluctuations in the gravitational potential, 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…
The integrated shear 3-point correlation function $\zeta_{\pm}$ measures the correlation between the local shear 2-point function $\xi_{\pm}$ and the 1-point shear aperture mass in patches of the sky. Unlike other higher-order statistics,…
In tomographic weak lensing surveys, the presence of nulling properties reveals symmetries inherent in the data, which rely solely on the geometrical properties of the Universe. Ensuring its validity thus provides us with constraints on the…
We propose a novel method to detect cosmic magnification signals by cross-correlating foreground convergence fields constructed from galaxy shear measurements with background galaxy positional distributions, namely shear-number density…
Correlations between intrinsic ellipticities of galaxies are a potentially important systematic error when constraining dark energy properties from weak gravitational lensing (cosmic shear) surveys. In the absence of perfectly known galaxy…
We note that galaxy-galaxy lensing by non-spherical galaxy halos produces a net anti-correlation between the shear of background galaxies and the ellipticity of foreground galaxies. This anti-correlation would contaminate the tomographic…
Gravitational lensing shear has the potential to be the most powerful tool for constraining the nature of dark energy. However, accurate measurement of galaxy shear is crucial and has been shown to be non-trivial by the Shear TEsting…
Statistical weak lensing by large-scale structure -- cosmic shear -- is a promising cosmological tool, which has motivated the design of several large upcoming surveys. Here, we present a measurement of cosmic shear using coadded Sloan…
We study the parameter estimation bias induced by intrinsic alignments on a Euclid-like weak lensing survey. For the intrinsic alignment signal we assume a composite alignment model for elliptical and spiral galaxies using tidal shearing…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…
We investigate the cosmological dependence and the constraining power of large-scale galaxy correlations, including all redshift-distortions, wide-angle, lensing and gravitational potential effects on linear scales. We analyze the…
A cosmic shear survey, spanning a significant proportion of the sky, should greatly improve constraints on a number of cosmological parameters. It also provides a unique opportunity to examine the matter power spectrum directly. However,…
Weak Gravitational Lensing is a powerful probe of the dark sector of the Universe. One of the main challenges for this technique is the treatment of systematics in the measurement of cosmic shear from galaxy shapes. In an earlier work,…
We present a cosmic shear analysis of the 100 square degree weak lensing survey, combining data from the CFHTLS-Wide, RCS, VIRMOS-DESCART and GaBoDS surveys. Spanning ~100 square degrees, with a median source redshift z~0.78, this combined…
The intrinsic alignment (IA) of galaxies has been shown to be a significant barrier to precision cosmic shear measurements. (Zhang, 2010, ApJ, 720, 1090) proposed a self-calibration technique for the power spectrum to calculate the induced…
Since cosmic shear was first observed in 2000, it has become a key cosmological probe and promises to deliver exquisite dark energy constraints. However, shear is inferred from coherent distortions of galaxy shapes, and the relation between…
Weak gravitational lensing induces flux dependent fluctuations in the observed galaxy number density distribution. This cosmic magnification (magnification bias) effect in principle enables lensing reconstruction alternative to cosmic shear…
Measurements of weak gravitational lensing using the cosmic microwave background and the shapes of galaxies have refined our understanding of the late-time history of the Universe. While optical surveys have been the primary source for…