The Impact of Quadratic Biases on Cosmic Shear

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how quadratic and higher-order biases in cosmic shear measurements affect cosmological parameter estimation, emphasizing the importance of measuring and controlling these biases for future dark energy surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism to quantify quadratic bias terms in cosmic shear and assesses their impact on power spectra and cosmological parameters.

Findings

Quadratic biases introduce additional bispectrum dependencies in shear power spectra.

Ignoring quadratic biases can lead to biases in cosmological parameters up to 0.4 sigma.

Stage-IV experiments need to measure and minimize these bias terms to ensure accurate cosmological inferences.

Abstract

In this paper we revisit potential biases in cosmic shear power spectra caused by bias terms that multiply up to quadratic powers of the shear. Expanding the multiplicative bias field as a series of independent spin-$s$ fields we find terms $m_s$ that multiply integer and half-integer powers of the shear. We propagate these biases into shape measurement statistics and the cosmic shear power spectrum. We find that such biases can be measured by performing regression on calibration data. We find that for integer powers of shear the impact of quadratic order terms on the power spectrum is an additional bispectrum dependency; ignoring quadratic terms can lead to biases in cosmological parameters of up to $2(m_2+m_{-2}-m_6)0.4\sigma$ for Stage-IV dark energy experiments, but that the susceptibility to them can be decreased by using methods to remove small-scale sensitivity. We also find, for half-integer powers of the shear that, for a Stage-IV experiment, biases are required to be known to better than approximately $\sigma[m_0+15(m_1+m_3)+0.1(m_{-1}+m_5)]\leq 0.01$. In future, Stage-IV dark energy experiments should seek to measure and minimise such all such bias terms.