Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmology from Cosmic Shear and Robustness to Data Calibration

TL;DR

This paper presents the most precise cosmic shear measurements from DES Year 3 data, constraining cosmological parameters with high significance and demonstrating robustness to data calibration and systematic uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides the first high-significance cosmic shear measurement from DES Year 3 data, with detailed analysis of robustness and systematic effects in cosmological constraints.

Findings

Measured $S_8$ with 2-3% precision, consistent with Planck CMB results.

Found $S_8$ values lower than high-redshift predictions by about 2 sigma.

Demonstrated robustness of results against calibration and modeling systematics.

Abstract

This work, together with its companion paper, Secco and Samuroff et al. (2021), presents the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 cosmic shear measurements and cosmological constraints based on an analysis of over 100 million source galaxies. With the data spanning 4143 deg$^2$ on the sky, divided into four redshift bins, we produce the highest significance measurement of cosmic shear to date, with a signal-to-noise of 40. We conduct a blind analysis in the context of the $\Lambda$CDM model and find a 3% constraint of the clustering amplitude, $S_8\equiv \sigma_8 (\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.759^{+0.025}_{-0.023}$. A $\Lambda$CDM-Optimized analysis, which safely includes smaller scale information, yields a 2% precision measurement of $S_8= 0.772^{+0.018}_{-0.017}$ that is consistent with the fiducial case. The two low-redshift measurements are statistically consistent with the Planck Cosmic Microwave Background result, however, both recovered $S_8$ values are lower than the high-redshift prediction by $2.3\sigma$ and $2.1\sigma$ ($p$-values of 0.02 and 0.05), respectively. The measurements are shown to be internally consistent across redshift bins, angular scales and correlation functions. The analysis is demonstrated to be robust to calibration systematics, with the $S_8$ posterior consistent when varying the choice of redshift calibration sample, the modeling of redshift uncertainty and methodology. Similarly, we find that the corrections included to account for the blending of galaxies shifts our best-fit $S_8$ by $0.5\sigma$ without incurring a substantial increase in uncertainty. We examine the limiting factors for the precision of the cosmological constraints and find observational systematics to be subdominant to the modeling of astrophysics. Specifically, we identify the uncertainties in modeling baryonic effects and intrinsic alignments as the limiting systematics.