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Cosmological constraints from the 100 square degree weak lensing survey

University of British Columbia

We present a cosmic shear analysis of the LOO square degree weak lensing survey, combining data from the CFHTLS-Wide, RCS, VIRMOS-DESCART and GaBoDS surveys. Spanning ~ 100 square degrees, with an average source redshift z ~ 0.8, this combined survey allows us to place tight joint constraints on the matter density parameter [formula omitted] and the amplitude of the matter power spectrum σ8, finding σ8 (Ωm / 0.24) [superscript omitted] = 0.84 ± 0.07. Tables of the measured shear correlation function and the calculated covariance matrix for each survey are included. The accuracy of our results are a marked improvement on previous work owing to three important differences in our analysis; we correctly account for cosmic variance errors by including a non-Gaussian contribution estimated from numerical simulations; we correct the measured shear for a calibration bias as estimated from simulated data; we model the redshift distribution, n(z), of each survey from the largest photometric redshift catalogue currently available from the CFHTLS-Deep. This catalogue is randomly sampled to reproduce the magnitude distribution of each survey with the resulting survey dependent n(z) parametrised using two different models. While our results are consistent for the n(z) models tested, we find that our cosmological parameter constraints depend weakly (at the 5% level) on the inclusion or exclusion of galaxies with low confidence photometric redshift estimates (z > 1.5). These high redshift galaxies are relatively few in number but contribute a significant weak lensing signal. It will therefore be important for future weak lensing surveys to obtain nearinfra- red data to reliably determine the number of high redshift galaxies in cosmic shear analyses.

Text

2011-02-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31847

Physics

University of British Columbia

Graduate