# The Impact of Spectroscopic Redshift Errors on Cosmological Measurements

**Authors:** Shengyu He, Jiaxi Yu, Antoine Rocher, Daniel Forero-S\'anchez, Jean-Paul Kneib, Cheng Zhao, Etienne Burtin, Jiamin Hou

arXiv: 2508.21182 · 2025-12-17

## TL;DR

Spectroscopic redshift errors can bias cosmological measurements from galaxy surveys, but modeling and correction strategies can mitigate these biases, especially for space-based slitless surveys like Euclid.

## Contribution

This work quantifies the impact of redshift errors on cosmological parameters and proposes correction methods for future galaxy surveys.

## Key findings

- Redshift uncertainty causes scale-dependent damping in the power spectrum.
- Catastrophic failures suppress the power spectrum amplitude proportionally to their rate.
-  Correcting for catastrophic failure rate reduces bias but weakens parameter constraints.

## Abstract

Spectroscopic redshift errors, including redshift uncertainty and catastrophic failures, can bias cosmological measurements from galaxy redshift surveys at sub-percent level. In this work, we investigate their impact on the full-shape analysis using contaminated mock catalogs. We find that redshift uncertainty introduces a scale-dependent damping effect on the power spectrum, which is absorbed by counterterms in clustering model, keeping parameter biases below $5\%$. Catastrophic failures suppress the power spectrum amplitude by an approximately constant factor that scales with the catastrophic rate $f_c$. While this effect is negligible for DESI galaxy populations ($f_c=1\%$), the slitless-like errors, combining redshift uncertainty with $f_c=5\%$ catastrophics, introduce significant biases in cosmological constraints. In this case, we observe $6\%$ to $16\%$ shifts ($\sim2.2\sigma$ level) in estimating the fractional growth rate $df\equiv f/f^{\rm{fid}}$ and the log primordial amplitude $\ln(10^{10} A_{s})$. Applying the correction factor $(1-f_c)^2$ on the galaxy power spectrum mitigates the bias but weakens the parameter constraints due to new degeneracies. Alternatively, fixing $f_c$ to its expected value restores the constraining power with a modest bias of $1.0\sigma$. Our results indicate that for space-based slitless surveys such as \textit{Euclid}, at minimum accurate estimation of $f_c$ and its incorporation into the clustering model are essential to get unbiased cosmological inference. Extending to evolving dark energy and massive neutrino cosmologies, redshift errors do not bias the dark energy properties parametrized by $w_0$ and $w_a$, but can degrade constraints on the summed neutrino mass $\sum m_\nu$ by up to 80% in the worst case.

## Full text

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## Figures

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/2508.21182