Joint Modelling of Astrophysical Systematics for Cosmology with LSST Cosmic Shear

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint modelling framework for astrophysical systematics in LSST cosmic shear analysis, focusing on the luminosity function's role in galaxy redshift distribution and intrinsic alignments, aiming to improve cosmological constraints.

Contribution

The novel framework jointly models galaxy luminosity functions with intrinsic alignments, enhancing cosmic shear analysis without fixing LF parameters, applicable to future weak lensing surveys.

Findings

LF significantly impacts redshift distribution and intrinsic alignment contamination.

Marginalising over LF parameters maintains consistent cosmological constraints.

Preliminary results show improved flexibility and potential bias reduction in cosmological inference.

Abstract

We present a novel framework for jointly modelling the weak lensing source galaxy redshift distribution and the intrinsic alignment of galaxies via a shared luminosity function (LF). Considering this framework within the context of a Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Year 1 and Year 10 cosmic shear analysis, we first demonstrate the substantial impact of the LF on both source galaxy redshift distributions and the intrinsic alignment contamination. We establish how the individual parameters of a Schechter LF model impact the redshift distribution of a magnitude-limited sample, and we demonstrate the effect of marginalising over the LF parameters as incorporated in the intrinsic alignment modelling of a standard cosmic shear analysis set-up. We forecast the impact of our joint modelling framework on cosmological parameter constraints. Our preliminary results are promising, indicating that this framework can yield cosmological constraints consistent with those expected from standard analyses, enhanced by the flexibility of not fixing LF parameters. We plan to further validate these findings with comprehensive Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations to robustly quantify bias avoidance and underscore the framework's efficacy. Taking advantage of our forecasting results and the parameter degeneracies, we identify the specific impact of the shape of the LF of source galaxies on the cosmic shear data vector. We also discuss the potential of this method in providing a way to model generic selection functions in redshift distribution estimation, as well as its possibilities for extension to a 3x2pt analysis, particularly with respect to incorporating galaxy bias in this luminosity-function-based framework. Although we consider the context of LSST cosmic shear in this work, the proposed joint modelling framework is generically applicable to weak lensing surveys.