The Weak Lensing Signal and the Clustering of BOSS Galaxies II: Astrophysical and Cosmological Constraints

TL;DR

This study combines galaxy abundance, clustering, and lensing data from SDSS III-BOSS and CFHTLenS to constrain cosmological parameters and galaxy-halo relations at redshift 0.53, demonstrating robustness and complementarity with other methods.

Contribution

It presents the first cosmological constraints at redshift 0.53 using a joint analysis of galaxy observables within the halo model framework.

Findings

Constraints on mbda_m and mbda_8 consistent with other probes

Robustness against sample selection and systematics demonstrated

First such analysis at redshift 0.53

Abstract

We perform a joint analysis of the abundance, the clustering and the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal of galaxies measured from Data Release 11 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (SDSS III-BOSS) in our companion paper, Miyatake et al. (2014). The lensing signal was obtained by using the shape catalog of background galaxies from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey, which was made publicly available by the CFHTLenS collaboration, with an area overlap of about 105 deg$^2$. We analyse the data in the framework of the halo model in order to fit halo occupation parameters and cosmological parameters ($\Omega_{\rm m}$ and $\sigma_8$) to these observables simultaneously, and thus break the degeneracy between galaxy bias and cosmology. Adopting a flat $\Lambda$CDM cosmology with priors on $\Omega_b h^2$, $n_{\rm s}$ and $h$ from the analysis of WMAP 9-year data, we obtain constraints on the stellar mass-halo mass relation of galaxies in our sample. Marginalizing over the halo occupation distribution parameters and a number of other nuisance parameters in our model, we obtain $\Omega_{\rm m}=0.310^{+0.019}_{-0.020}$ and $\sigma_8=0.785^{+0.044}_{-0.044}$ (68% confidence). We demonstrate the robustness of our results with respect to sample selection and a variety of systematics such as the halo off-centering effect and possible incompleteness in our sample. Our constraints are consistent, complementary and competitive with those obtained using other independent probes of these cosmological parameters. The cosmological analysis is the first of its kind to be performed at a redshift as high as $0.53$.