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Survey geometry and the internal consistency of recent cosmic shear measurements

Troxel, MA; Krause, E; Chang, C; Eifler, TF; Friedrich, O; Gruen, D; MacCrann, N; ... Wechsler, RH; + view all (2018) Survey geometry and the internal consistency of recent cosmic shear measurements. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , 479 (4) pp. 4998-5004. 10.1093/mnras/sty1889. Green open access

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Abstract

We explore the impact of an update to the typical approximation for the shape noise term in the analytic covariance matrix for cosmic shear experiments that assumes the absence of survey boundary and mask effects. We present an exact expression for the number of galaxy pairs in this term based on the survey mask, which leads to more than a factor of three increase in the shape noise on the largest measured scales for the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-450) real-space cosmic shear data. We compare the result of this analytic expression to several alternative methods for measuring the shape noise from the data and find excellent agreement. This update to the covariance resolves any internal model tension evidenced by the previously large cosmological best-fitting χ2 for the KiDS-450 cosmic shear data. The best-fitting χ2 is reduced from 161 to 121 for 118 degrees of freedom. We also apply a correction to how the multiplicative shear calibration uncertainty is included in the covariance. This change shifts the inferred amplitude of the correlation function to higher values. We find that this improves agreement of the KiDS-450 cosmic shear results with Dark Energy Survey Year 1 and Planck results.

Type: Article
Title: Survey geometry and the internal consistency of recent cosmic shear measurements
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty1889
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty1889
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Gravitational lensing: weak, methods: data analysis, methods: statistical
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10083440
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