Increasing the power of weak lensing survey data with multipole-based intrinsic alignment estimators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multipole-based estimator for intrinsic alignments in galaxy surveys, significantly improving parameter inference precision without additional data or modeling complexity.

Contribution

It presents a novel multipole expansion estimator that enhances the extraction of intrinsic alignment signals from galaxy survey data.

Findings

Increases significance of model parameters using simulated data

Achieves ~2x greater precision in real data

Equivalent to quadrupling survey area in effectiveness

Abstract

It has long been known that galaxy shapes align coherently with the large-scale density field. Characterizing this effect is essential to interpreting measurements of weak gravitational lensing, the deflection of light from distant galaxies by matter overdensities along the line of sight, as it also produces coherent galaxy alignments that we wish to interpret in terms of a cosmological model. Existing direct measurements of intrinsic alignments using galaxy samples with high-quality shape and redshift measurements typically use well-understood but sub-optimal projected estimators, which do not make good use of the information in the data when comparing those estimators to theoretical models. We demonstrate a more optimal estimator, based on a multipole expansion of the correlation functions or power spectra, for direct measurements of galaxy intrinsic alignments. We show that even using the lowest order multipole alone increases the significance of inferred model parameters using simulated and real data, without any additional modeling complexity. We apply this estimator to measurements of parameters of the non-linear alignment model using data from the Sloan Digital Sky survey, demonstrating consistent results with a factor of $\sim$2 greater precision in parameter fits to intrinsic alignments models. This result is functionally equivalent to quadrupling the survey area, but without the attendant costs -- thereby demonstrating the value in using this new estimator in current and future intrinsic alignments measurements using spectroscopic galaxy samples.