Inference from the small scales of cosmic shear with current and future Dark Energy Survey data

TL;DR

This paper analyzes small-scale cosmic shear data from the Dark Energy Survey to assess its potential for constraining baryonic physics, highlighting systematic challenges and future prospects.

Contribution

It extends cosmic shear analysis to smaller scales, evaluates baryonic feedback models, and discusses systematic effects impacting interpretation.

Findings

DES SV data limited but promising for baryonic feedback constraints

Systematic effects like intrinsic alignment and shape measurement biases are significant

Future datasets can differentiate feedback scenarios with improved modeling

Abstract

Cosmic shear is sensitive to fluctuations in the cosmological matter density field, including on small physical scales, where matter clustering is affected by baryonic physics in galaxies and galaxy clusters, such as star formation, supernovae feedback and AGN feedback. While muddying any cosmological information that is contained in small scale cosmic shear measurements, this does mean that cosmic shear has the potential to constrain baryonic physics and galaxy formation. We perform an analysis of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification (SV) cosmic shear measurements, now extended to smaller scales, and using the Mead et al. 2015 halo model to account for baryonic feedback. While the SV data has limited statistical power, we demonstrate using a simulated likelihood analysis that the final DES data will have the statistical power to differentiate among baryonic feedback scenarios. We also explore some of the difficulties in interpreting the small scales in cosmic shear measurements, presenting estimates of the size of several other systematic effects that make inference from small scales difficult, including uncertainty in the modelling of intrinsic alignment on nonlinear scales, `lensing bias', and shape measurement selection effects. For the latter two, we make use of novel image simulations. While future cosmic shear datasets have the statistical power to constrain baryonic feedback scenarios, there are several systematic effects that require improved treatments, in order to make robust conclusions about baryonic feedback.