The DECADE cosmic shear project III: validation of analysis pipeline using spatially inhomogeneous data

TL;DR

This paper develops and validates a cosmic shear analysis pipeline for the inhomogeneous DECADE dataset, demonstrating its robustness and reliability in deriving cosmological constraints despite data inhomogeneity.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive analysis pipeline tailored for inhomogeneous weak lensing data and validates its robustness through extensive simulations and subset analyses.

Findings

Pipeline is robust against survey inhomogeneities.

Analysis choices significantly affect cosmological constraints.

Results are consistent across multiple data subsets within uncertainties.

Abstract

We present the pipeline for the cosmic shear analysis of the Dark Energy Camera All Data Everywhere (DECADE) weak lensing dataset: a catalog consisting of 107 million galaxies observed by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in the northern Galactic cap. The catalog derives from a large number of disparate observing programs and is therefore more inhomogeneous across the sky compared to existing lensing surveys. First, we use simulated data-vectors to show the sensitivity of our constraints to different analysis choices in our inference pipeline, including sensitivity to residual systematics. Next we use simulations to validate our covariance modeling for inhomogeneous datasets. Finally, we show that our choices in the end-to-end cosmic shear pipeline are robust against inhomogeneities in the survey, by extracting relative shifts in the cosmology constraints across different subsets of the footprint/catalog and showing they are all consistent within $1\sigma$ to $2\sigma$. This is done for forty-six subsets of the data and is carried out in a fully consistent manner: for each subset of the data, we re-derive the photometric redshift estimates, shear calibrations, survey transfer functions, the data vector, measurement covariance, and finally, the cosmological constraints. Our results show that existing analysis methods for weak lensing cosmology can be fairly resilient towards inhomogeneous datasets. This also motivates exploring a wider range of image data for pursuing such cosmological constraints.