Detecting baryon acoustic oscillations by 3d weak lensing

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of 3d weak lensing to detect baryon acoustic oscillations in the cosmic matter distribution, demonstrating that future surveys like EUCLID and DES can measure the first four wiggles with good precision.

Contribution

It introduces a specialized 3d shear estimation method to detect baryon oscillations, which are inaccessible to traditional weak lensing tomography, and assesses survey capabilities.

Findings

EUCLID can measure the first four wiggles with high precision

Future surveys can detect baryon acoustic oscillations using 3d weak lensing

Error correlations depend on survey parameters such as redshift and sky coverage

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of detecting baryon acoustic oscillation features in the cosmic matter distribution by 3d weak lensing. Baryon oscillations are inaccessible even to weak lensing tomography because of wide line-of-sight weighting functions and require a specialized approach via 3d shear estimates. We quantify the uncertainty of estimating the matter spectrum amplitude at the baryon oscillations wave vectors by a Fisher-matrix approach with a fixed cosmology and show in this way that future weak lensing surveys such as EUCLID and DES are able to pick up the first four wiggles, with EUCLID giving a better precision in the measurement. We also provide a detailed investigation of the correlation existing between errors and of their scaling behavior with respect to survey parameters such as median redshift, error on redshift, error on the galaxy shape measurement, sky coverage, and finally with respect to the number of wiggles one is trying to determine.