Higher order, non-Gaussian aspects of the large-scale structure carry valuable information on structure formation and cosmology, which is complementary to second-order statistics. In this work, we ...measure second- and third-order weak-lensing aperture-mass moments from the Canada–France–Hawaii Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) and combine those with cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy probes. The third moment is measured with a significance of 2σ. The combined constraint on Σ8 = σ8(Ωm/0.27)α is improved by 10 per cent, in comparison to the second-order only, and the allowed ranges for Ωm and σ8 are substantially reduced. Including general triangles of the lensing bispectrum yields tighter constraints compared to probing mainly equilateral triangles. Second- and third-order CFHTLenS lensing measurements improve Planck CMB constraints on Ωm and σ8 by 26 per cent for flat Λ cold dark matter. For a model with free curvature, the joint CFHTLenS–Planck result is Ωm = 0.28 ± 0.02 (68 per cent confidence), which is an improvement of 43 per cent compared to Planck alone. We test how our results are potentially subject to three astrophysical sources of contamination: source-lens clustering, the intrinsic alignment of galaxy shapes, and baryonic effects. We explore future limitations of the cosmological use of third-order weak lensing, such as the non-linear model and the Gaussianity of the likelihood function.
We present weak lensing and X-ray analysis of 12 low-mass clusters from the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey and XMM-CFHTLS surveys. We combine these systems with high-mass systems from ...Canadian Cluster Comparison Project and low-mass systems from Cosmic Evolution Survey to obtain a sample of 70 systems, spanning over two orders of magnitude in mass. We measure core-excised L
X–T
X, M–L
X and M–T
X scaling relations and include corrections for observational biases. By providing fully bias-corrected relations, we give the current limitations for L
X and T
X as cluster mass proxies. We demonstrate that T
X benefits from a significantly lower intrinsic scatter at fixed mass than L
X. By studying the residuals of the bias-corrected relations, we show for the first time using weak lensing masses that galaxy groups seem more luminous and warmer for their mass than clusters. This implies a steepening of the M–L
X and M–T
X relations at low masses. We verify the inferred steepening using a different high-mass sample from the literature and show that variance between samples is the dominant effect leading to discrepant scaling relations. We divide our sample into subsamples of merging and relaxed systems, and find that mergers may have enhanced scatter in lensing measurements, most likely due to stronger triaxiality and more substructure. For the L
X–T
X relation, which is unaffected by lensing measurements, we find the opposite trend in scatter. We also explore the effects of X-ray cross-calibration and find that Chandra calibration leads to flatter L
X–T
X and M–T
X relations than XMM–Newton.
Aims. We measure and study the evolution of the UV galaxy luminosity function (LF) at z = 3−5 from the largest high-redshift survey to date, the Deep part of the CFHT Legacy Survey. We also give ...accurate estimates of the SFR density at these redshifts. Methods. We consider ~100 000 Lyman-break galaxies at z ≈ 3.1, 3.8 and 4.8 selected from very deep ugriz images of this data set and estimate their rest-frame 1600 Å luminosity function. Due to the large survey volume, cosmic variance plays a negligible role. Furthermore, we measure the bright end of the LF with unprecedented statistical accuracy. Contamination fractions from stars and low-z galaxy interlopers are estimated from simulations. From these simulations the redshift distributions of the Lyman-break galaxies in the different samples are estimated, and those redshifts are used to choose bands and calculate k-corrections so that the LFs are compared at the same rest-frame wavelength. To correct for incompleteness, we study the detection rate of simulated galaxies injected to the images as a function of magnitude and redshift. We estimate the contribution of several systematic effects in the analysis to test the robustness of our results. Results. We find the bright end of the LF of our u-dropout sample to deviate significantly from a Schechter function. If we modify the function by a recently proposed magnification model, the fit improves. For the first time in an LBG sample, we can measure down to the density regime where magnification affects the shape of the observed LF because of the very bright and rare galaxies we are able to probe with this data set. We find an increase in the normalisation, φ∗, of the LF by a factor of 2.5 between z ≈ 5 and z ≈ 3. The faint-end slope of the LF does not evolve significantly between z ≈ 5 and z ≈ 3. We do not find a significant evolution of the characteristic magnitude in the studied redshift interval, possibly because of insufficient knowledge of the source redshift distribution. The SFR density is found to increase by a factor of ~2 from z ≈ 5 to z ≈ 4. The evolution from z ≈ 4 to z ≈ 3 is less eminent.
We present an investigation into the effects of survey systematics such as varying depth, point spread function size, and extinction on the galaxy selection and correlation in photometric, ...multi-epoch, wide area surveys. We take the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) as an example. Variations in galaxy selection due to systematics are found to cause density fluctuations of up to 10 per cent for some small fraction of the area for most galaxy redshift slices and as much as 50 per cent for some extreme cases of faint high-redshift samples. This results in correlations of galaxies against survey systematics of order ∼1 per cent when averaged over the survey area. We present an empirical method for mitigating these systematic correlations from measurements of angular correlation functions using weighted random points. These weighted random catalogues are estimated from the observed galaxy overdensities by mapping these to survey parameters. We are able to model and mitigate the effect of systematic correlations allowing for non-linear dependences of density on systematics. Applied to CFHTLenS, we find that the method reduces spurious correlations in the data by a factor of 2 for most galaxy samples and as much as an order of magnitude in others. Such a treatment is particularly important for an unbiased estimation of very small correlation signals, as e.g. from weak gravitational lensing magnification bias. We impose a criterion for using a galaxy sample in a magnification measurement of the majority of the systematic correlations show improvement and are less than 10 per cent of the expected magnification signal when combined in the galaxy cross-correlation. After correction the galaxy samples in CFHTLenS satisfy this criterion for z
phot < 0.9 and will be used in a future analysis of magnification.
Abstract
The Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS) is an innovative photometric survey with 40 narrow-bands at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). The narrow-bands are spaced at 100 Å ...intervals covering the range 4500–8500 Å and, in combination with standard broad-bands, enable excellent redshift precision. This paper describes the technique, galaxy templates, and additional photometric calibration used to determine early photometric redshifts from PAUS. Using bcnz2, a new photometric redshift code developed for this purpose, we characterize the photometric redshift performance using PAUS data on the COSMOS field. Comparison to secure spectra from zCOSMOS DR3 shows that PAUS achieves σ68/(1 + $z$) = 0.0037 to iAB < 22.5 for the redshift range 0 < $z$ < 1.2, when selecting the best 50 per cent of the sources based on a photometric redshift quality cut. Furthermore, a higher photo-z precision σ68/(1 + $z$) ∼ 0.001 is obtained for a bright and high-quality selection, which is driven by the identification of emission lines. We conclude that PAUS meets its design goals, opening up a hitherto uncharted regime of deep, wide, and dense galaxy survey with precise redshifts that will provide unique insights into the formation, evolution, and clustering of galaxies, as well as their intrinsic alignments.
We present the Red Cluster Sequence Lensing Survey (RCSLenS), an application of the methods developed for the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) to the ∼785 deg2, multi-band ...imaging data of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey 2. This project represents the largest public, sub-arcsecond seeing, multi-band survey to date that is suited for weak gravitational lensing measurements. With a careful assessment of systematic errors in shape measurements and photometric redshifts, we extend the use of this data set to allow cross-correlation analyses between weak lensing observables and other data sets. We describe the imaging data, the data reduction, masking, multi-colour photometry, photometric redshifts, shape measurements, tests for systematic errors, and a blinding scheme to allow for more objective measurements. In total, we analyse 761 pointings with r-band coverage, which constitutes our lensing sample. Residual large-scale B-mode systematics prevent the use of this shear catalogue for cosmic shear science. The effective number density of lensing sources over an unmasked area of 571.7 deg2 and down to a magnitude limit of r ∼ 24.5 is 8.1 galaxies per arcmin2 (weighted: 5.5 arcmin−2) distributed over 14 patches on the sky. Photometric redshifts based on four-band griz data are available for 513 pointings covering an unmasked area of 383.5 deg2. We present weak lensing mass reconstructions of some example clusters as well as the full survey representing the largest areas that have been mapped in this way. All our data products are publicly available through Canadian Astronomy Data Centre at http://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/community/rcslens/query.html in a format very similar to the CFHTLenS data release.
Here we present the results of various approaches to measure accurate colours and photometric redshifts (photo-z) from wide-field imaging data. We use data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope ...Legacy Survey which have been re-processed by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) team in order to carry out a number of weak gravitational lensing studies. An emphasis is put on the correction of systematic effects in the photo-z arising from the different point spread functions (PSFs) in the five optical bands. Different ways of correcting these effects are discussed and the resulting photo-z accuracies are quantified by comparing the photo-z to large spectroscopic redshift (spec-z) data sets. Careful homogenization of the PSF between bands leads to increased overall accuracy of photo-z. The gain is particularly pronounced at fainter magnitudes where galaxies are smaller and flux measurements are affected more by PSF effects. We discuss ways of defining more secure subsamples of galaxies as well as a shape- and colour-based star-galaxy separation method, and we present redshift distributions for different magnitude limits. We also study possible re-calibrations of the photometric zero-points (ZPs) with the help of galaxies with known spec-z. We find that if PSF effects are properly taken into account, a re-calibration of the ZPs becomes much less important suggesting that previous such re-calibrations described in the literature could in fact be mostly corrections for PSF effects rather than corrections for real inaccuracies in the ZPs. The implications of this finding for future surveys like the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS), Dark Energy Survey (DES), Large Synoptic Survey Telescope or Euclid are mixed. On the one hand, ZP re-calibrations with spec-z values might not be as accurate as previously thought. On the other hand, careful PSF homogenization might provide a way out and yield accurate, homogeneous photometry without the need for full spectroscopic coverage. This is the first paper in a series describing the technical aspects of CFHTLenS.
We present data products from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). CFHTLenS is based on the Wide component of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). It ...encompasses 154 deg2 of deep, optical, high-quality, sub-arcsecond imaging data in the five optical filters u*g
′
r
′
i
′
z
′. The scientific aims of the CFHTLenS team are weak gravitational lensing studies supported by photometric redshift estimates for the galaxies. This paper presents our data processing of the complete CFHTLenS data set. We were able to obtain a data set with very good image quality and high-quality astrometric and photometric calibration. Our external astrometric accuracy is between 60 and 70 mas with respect to Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data, and the internal alignment in all filters is around 30 mas. Our average photometric calibration shows a dispersion of the order of 0.01-0.03 mag for g
′
r
′
i
′
z
′ and about 0.04 mag for u* with respect to SDSS sources down to i
SDSS ≤ 21. We demonstrate in accompanying papers that our data meet necessary requirements to fully exploit the survey for weak gravitational lensing analyses in connection with photometric redshift studies. In the spirit of the CFHTLS, all our data products are released to the astronomical community via the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre at http://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/community/CFHTLens/query.html. We give a description and how-to manuals of the public products which include image pixel data, source catalogues with photometric redshift estimates and all relevant quantities to perform weak lensing studies.
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