Self Calibration of Tomographic Weak Lensing for the Physics of Baryons to Constrain Dark Energy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that future weak lensing surveys can self-calibrate baryonic physics effects, significantly reducing biases in dark energy measurements while maintaining strong parameter constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a method to simultaneously constrain halo structures and dark energy parameters, reducing biases caused by baryonic physics in shear power spectrum analyses.

Findings

Self calibration reduces parameter biases by up to 40%.

Surveys can constrain halo concentrations to better than 10%.

Baryonic effects can be mitigated without substantial loss of dark energy information.

Abstract

Numerical studies indicate that uncertainties in the treatment of baryonic physics can affect predictions for shear power spectra at a level that is significant for forthcoming surveys such as DES, SNAP, and LSST. Correspondingly, we show that baryonic effects can significantly bias dark energy parameter measurements. Eliminating such biases by neglecting information in multipoles beyond several hundred leads to weaker parameter constraints by a factor of approximately 2 to 3 compared with using information out to multipoles of several thousand. Fortunately, the same numerical studies that explore the influence of baryons indicate that they primarily affect power spectra by altering halo structure through the relation between halo mass and mean effective halo concentration. We explore the ability of future weak lensing surveys to constrain both the internal structures of halos and the properties of the dark energy simultaneously as a first step toward self calibrating for the physics of baryons. This greatly reduces parameter biases and no parameter constraint is degraded by more than 40% in the case of LSST or 30% in the cases of SNAP or DES. Modest prior knowledge of the halo concentration relation greatly improves even these forecasts. Additionally, we find that these surveys can constrain effective halo concentrations near m~10^14 Msun/h and z~0.2 to better than 10% with shear power spectra alone. These results suggest that inferring dark energy parameters with measurements of shear power spectra can be made robust to baryonic effects and may simultaneously be competitive with other methods to inform models of galaxy formation. (Abridged)