The DESI-Lensing Mock Challenge: large-scale cosmological analysis of 3x2-pt statistics

TL;DR

This paper validates an analysis pipeline for combining galaxy survey and lensing data using 3x2-pt statistics, demonstrating accurate recovery of cosmological parameters in realistic simulations.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive simulation-based validation of the 3x2-pt analysis pipeline for DESI Year 1 data, including covariance modeling and parameter recovery.

Findings

Covariance estimates agree with simulation-based measurements.

Fiducial cosmological parameters are recovered within statistical errors.

Analysis is robust to various scale cuts.

Abstract

The current generation of large galaxy surveys will test the cosmological model by combining multiple types of observational probes. Realising the statistical promise of these new datasets requires rigorous attention to all aspects of analysis including cosmological measurements, modelling, covariance and parameter likelihood. In this paper we present the results of an end-to-end simulation study designed to test the analysis pipeline for the combination of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Year 1 galaxy redshift dataset and separate weak gravitational lensing information from the Kilo-Degree Survey, Dark Energy Survey and Hyper-Suprime-Cam Survey. Our analysis employs the 3x2-pt correlation functions including cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing, together with the projected correlation function of the spectroscopic DESI lenses. We build realistic simulations of these datasets including galaxy halo occupation distributions, photometric redshift errors, weights, multiplicative shear calibration biases and magnification. We calculate the analytical covariance of these correlation functions including the Gaussian, noise and super-sample contributions, and show that our covariance determination agrees with estimates based on the ensemble of simulations. We use a Bayesian inference platform to demonstrate that we can recover the fiducial cosmological parameters of the simulation within the statistical error margin of the experiment, investigating the sensitivity to scale cuts. This study is the first in a sequence of papers in which we present and validate the large-scale 3x2-pt cosmological analysis of DESI-Y1.