Detection of Cosmic Magnification via Galaxy Shear -- Galaxy Number Density Correlation from HSC Survey Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to detect cosmic magnification by cross-correlating galaxy shear and number density, applying it to HSC survey data, and demonstrating its potential to improve shear bias constraints and cosmological tests.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel shear-number density correlation technique for cosmic magnification detection and bias calibration, validated with HSC data and mock simulations, enhancing weak lensing analysis.

Findings

Clear detection of magnification signals in HSC data.

Forecasted constraint on shear bias is 2.3 times tighter.

Joint constraints are nearly independent of cosmological parameters.

Abstract

We propose a novel method to detect cosmic magnification signals by cross-correlating foreground convergence fields constructed from galaxy shear measurements with background galaxy positional distributions, namely shear-number density correlation. We apply it to the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) survey data. With 27 non-independent data points and their full covariance, $\chi_0^2\approx 34.1$ and $\chi_T^2\approx 24.0$ with respect to the null and the cosmological model with the parameters from HSC shear correlation analyses in Hamana et al. 2020 (arXiv:1906.06041), respectively. The Bayes factor of the two is $\log_{10}B_{T0}\approx 2.2$ assuming equal model probabilities of null and HSC cosmology, showing a clear detection of the magnification signals. Theoretically, the ratio of the shear-number density and shear-shear correlations can provide a constraint on the effective multiplicative shear bias $\bar m$ using internal data themselves. We demonstrate the idea with the signals from our HSC-SSP mock simulations and rescaling the statistical uncertainties to a survey of $15000\deg^2$. For two-bin analyses with background galaxies brighter than $m_{lim}=23$, the combined analyses lead to a forecasted constraint of $\sigma(\bar m) \sim 0.032$, $2.3$ times tighter than that of using the shear-shear correlation alone. Correspondingly, $\sigma(S_8)$ with $S_8=\sigma_8(\Omega_\mathrm{m}/0.3)^{0.5}$ is tightened by $\sim 2.1$ times. Importantly, the joint constraint on $\bar m$ is nearly independent of cosmological parameters. Our studies therefore point to the importance of including the shear-number density correlation in weak lensing analyses, which can provide valuable consistency tests of observational data, and thus to solidify the derived cosmological constraints.