Propagating spatially-varying multiplicative shear bias to cosmological parameter estimation for stage-IV weak-lensing surveys

TL;DR

This paper assesses how spatially-varying multiplicative shear biases affect cosmological parameter estimates in stage-IV weak-lensing surveys, finding biases can be significant and should inform systematic control requirements.

Contribution

It introduces a computationally efficient method to estimate the impact of spatially-varying shear biases on cosmological parameters using a pseudo-Cl approach and Fisher analysis.

Findings

Biases can reach ~10% of statistical errors for rms m-bias of 0.01.

Parameter biases depend on the amplitude and scale of m-bias spatial variations.

Requirements on the rms of m-bias variations are necessary to control systematic errors.

Abstract

We consider the bias introduced by a spatially-varying multiplicative shear bias (m-bias) on tomographic cosmic shear angular power spectra. To compute the bias in the power spectra, we estimate the mode-coupling matrix associated with an m-bias map using a computationally-efficient pseudo-Cl method. This allows us to consider the effect of the m-bias to high l. We then conduct a Fisher matrix analysis to forecast resulting biases in cosmological parameters. For a Euclid-like survey with a spatially-varying m-bias, with zero mean and rms of 0.01, we find that parameter biases reach a maximum of ~10% of the expected statistical error, if multipoles up to l_max = 5000 are included. We conclude that the effect of the spatially-varying m-bias may be a sub-dominant but potentially non-negligible contribution to the error budget in forthcoming weak lensing surveys. We also investigate the dependence of parameter biases on the amplitude and angular scale of spatial variations of the m-bias field, and conclude that requirements should be placed on the rms of spatial variations of the m-bias, in addition to any requirement on the mean value. We find that, for a Euclid-like survey, biases generally exceed ~30% of the statistical error for m-bias rms 0.02 - 0.03 and can exceed the statistical error for rms ~0.04 - 0.05. This allows requirements to be set on the permissible amplitude of spatial variations of the m-bias that will arise due to systematics in forthcoming weak lensing measurements.