H-ATLAS/GAMA: Magnification Bias Tomography. Astrophysical constraints above $\sim1$ arcmin

TL;DR

This study uses improved cross-correlation measurements between GAMA and H-ATLAS galaxies to perform a tomographic analysis, constraining astrophysical properties of lensing galaxies and background sources through halo modeling.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed tomographic analysis of magnification bias using updated data, revealing the evolution of lens halo masses with redshift and identifying strong lensing effects at small scales.

Findings

Lens source halos have masses around 10^{12.3} M_0, consistent with previous studies.

Lens galaxies or groups have masses around 10^{13.1} M_0, with satellite contributions at higher masses.

Halo mass evolution with redshift aligns with theoretical expectations.

Abstract

In this work we measure and study the cross-correlation signal between a foreground sample of GAMA galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts in the range $0.2<z<0.8$, and a background sample of H-ATLAS galaxies with photometric redshifts $\gtrsim1.2$. It constitutes a substantial improvement over the cross-correlation measurements made by Gonzalez-Nuevo et al. (2014) with updated catalogues and wider area (with $S/N\gtrsim 5$ below 10' and reaching $S/N\sim 20$ below 30"). The better statistics allow us to split the sample in different redshift bins and to perform a tomographic analysis (with $S/N\gtrsim 3$ below 10 arcmin and reaching $S/N\sim 15$ below 30"). Moreover, we implement a halo model to extract astrophysical information about the background galaxies and the deflectors that are producing the lensing link between the foreground (lenses) and background (sources) samples. In the case of the sources, we find typical mass values in agreement with previous studies: a minimum halo mass to host a central galaxy, $M_{min}\sim 10^{12.26} M_\odot$, and a pivot halo mass to have at least one sub-halo satellite, $M_1\sim 10^{12.84} M_\odot$. However, the lenses are massive galaxies or even galaxy groups/clusters, with minimum mass of $M_{min}^{lens}\sim 10^{13.06} M_\odot$. Above a mass of $M_1^{lens}\sim 10^{14.57} M_\odot$ they contain at least one additional satellite galaxy which contributes to the lensing effect. The tomographic analysis shows that, while $M_1^{lens}$ is almost redshift independent, there is a clear evolution of increase $M_{min}^{lens}$ with redshift in agreement with theoretical estimations. Finally, the halo modeling allows us to identify a strong lensing contribution to the cross-correlation for angular scales below 30". This interpretation is supported by the results of basic but effective simulations.