Redshift distributions of galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification shear catalogue and implications for weak lensing

Journal Article · Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · Physical Review D

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.042005· OSTI ID:1223240

Bonnett, C.; Troxel, M. A.; Hartley, W.; Amara, A.; Leistedt, B.; Becker, M. R.; Bernstein, G. M.; Bridle, S. L.; Bruderer, C.; Busha, M. T.; Carrasco Kind, M.; Childress, M. J.; Castander, F. J.; Chang, C.; Crocce, M.; Davis, T. M.; Eifler, T. F.; Frieman, J.; Gangkofner, C.; Gaztanaga, E. ; Glazebrook, K.; Gruen, D.; Kacprzak, T.; King, A.; Kwan, J.; Lahav, O.; Lewis, G.; Lidman, C.; Lin, H.; MacCrann, N.; Miquel, R.; O’Neill, C. R.; Palmese, A.; Peiris, H. V.; Refregier, A.; Rozo, E.; Rykoff, E. S.; Sadeh, I.; Sánchez, C.; Sheldon, E.; Uddin, S.; Wechsler, R. H.; Zuntz, J.; Abbott, T.; Abdalla, F. B.; Allam, S.; Armstrong, R.; Banerji, M.; Bauer, A. H.; Benoit-Lévy, A.; Bertin, E.; Brooks, D.; Buckley-Geer, E.; Burke, D. L.; Capozzi, D.; Carnero Rosell, A.; Carretero, J.; Cunha, C. E.; D’Andrea, C. B.; da Costa, L. N.; DePoy, D. L.; Desai, S.; Diehl, H. T.; Dietrich, J. P.; Doel, P.; Fausti Neto, A.; Fernandez, E.; Flaugher, B.; Fosalba, P.; Gerdes, D. W.; Gruendl, R. A.; Honscheid, K.; Jain, B.; James, D. J.; Jarvis, M.; Kim, A. G.; Kuehn, K.; Kuropatkin, N.; Li, T. S.; Lima, M.; Maia, M. A. G.; March, M.; Marshall, J. L.; Martini, P.; Melchior, P.; Miller, C. J.; Neilsen, E.; Nichol, R. C.; Nord, B.; Ogando, R.; Plazas, A. A.; Reil, K.; Romer, A. K.; Roodman, A.; Sako, M.; Sanchez, E.; Santiago, B.; Smith, R. C.; Soares-Santos, M.; Sobreira, F.; Suchyta, E.; Swanson, M. E. C.; Tarle, G.; Thaler, J.; Thomas, D.; Vikram, V.; Walker, A. R.

We present photometric redshift estimates for galaxies used in the weak lensing analysis of the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification (DES SV) data. Four model- or machine learning-based photometric redshift methods { annz2, bpz calibrated against BCC-U fig simulations, skynet, and tpz { are analysed. For training, calibration, and testing of these methods, we also construct a catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed galaxies matched against DES SV data. The performance of the methods is evalu-ated against the matched spectroscopic catalogue, focusing on metrics relevant for weak lensing analyses, with additional validation against COSMOS photo-zs. From the galaxies in the DES SV shear catalogue, which have mean redshift 0.72 ±0.01 over the range 0:3 < z < 1:3, we construct three tomographic bins with means of z = {0.45; 0.67,1.00g}. These bins each have systematic uncertainties δ_z ≲ 0.05 in the mean of the fiducial skynet photo-z n(z). We propagate the errors in the redshift distributions through to their impact on cosmological parameters estimated with cosmic shear, and find that they cause shifts in the value of σ₈ of approx. 3%. This shift is within the one sigma statistical errors on σ8 for the DES SV shear catalog. We also found that further study of the potential impact of systematic differences on the critical surface density, Σ_crit, contained levels of bias safely less than the statistical power of DES SV data. We recommend a final Gaussian prior for the photo-z bias in the mean of n(z) of width 0:05 for each of the three tomographic bins, and show that this is a sufficient bias model for the corresponding cosmology analysis.

• Research Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• Contributing Organization: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-07CH11359
• OSTI ID: 1223240
• Report Number(s): FERMILAB-PUB-15-306; PRVDAQ; arXiv eprint number arXiv:1507.05909
• Journal Information: Physical Review D, Vol. 94, Issue 4; ISSN 2470-0010
• Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
cosmology:distance scale
galaxies: distances and redshifts
galaxies: statistics
large scale structure of Universe
gravitational lensing: weak