Combining weak lensing tomography and spectroscopic redshift surveys

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that combining weak lensing tomography with spectroscopic redshift surveys significantly improves constraints on cosmic growth parameters by breaking degeneracies and reducing cosmic variance.

Contribution

It introduces a method to enhance growth measurements by overlapping lensing and spectroscopic surveys, improving parameter accuracy beyond traditional approaches.

Findings

Lensing-spectroscopic overlap improves growth parameter constraints.

Overlapping surveys outperform separated ones in constraining  (f=m^{\u03b3})

The method is especially effective for surveys with halo mass thresholds around 10^{13}-10^{14} h^{-1} M_solar.

Abstract

Redshift space distortion (RSD) is a powerful way of measuring the growth of structure and testing General Relativity, but it is limited by cosmic variance and the degeneracy between galaxy bias b and the growth rate factor f. The cross-correlation of lensing shear with the galaxy density field can in principle measure b in a manner free from cosmic variance limits, breaking the f-b degeneracy and allowing inference of the matter power spectrum from the galaxy survey. We analyze the growth constraints from a realistic tomographic weak lensing photo-z survey combined with a spectroscopic galaxy redshift survey over the same sky area. For sky coverage f_sky=0.5, analysis of the transverse modes measures b to 2-3% accuracy per \Delta z=0.1 bin at z<1 when \sim10 galaxies per square arcmin are measured in the lensing survey and all halos with M>M_min=10^13 h^{-1}M_solar have spectra. For the gravitational growth parameter parameter \gamma (f=\Omega_m^{\gamma}), combining the lensing information with RSD analysis of non-transverse modes yields accuracy \sigma(\gamma)\sim 0.01. Adding lensing information to the RSD survey improves \sigma(\gamma) by an amount equivalent to a 3 times (10 times) increase in RSD survey area when the spectroscopic survey extends down to halo mass 10^13.5 (10^14) h^{-1} M_solar. We also find that the \sigma(\gamma) of overlapping surveys is equivalent to that of surveys 1.5-2 times larger if they are separated on the sky. This gain is greatest when the spectroscopic mass threshold is 10^13 - 10^14 h^{-1} M_solar, similar to LRG surveys. The gain of overlapping surveys is reduced for very deep or very shallow spectroscopic surveys, but any practical surveys are more powerful when overlapped than when separated. The gain of overlapped surveys is larger in the case when the primordial power spectrum normalization is uncertain by >0.5%.