Fisher Forecasts for Cosmological Yields from $3\!\times\!2$pt Analysis of the Roman Space Telescope High Latitude Imaging Survey

TL;DR

This paper uses Fisher forecasts to evaluate the potential of the Roman Space Telescope's High Latitude Imaging Survey for constraining cosmological parameters through combined weak lensing, galaxy-galaxy lensing, and galaxy clustering measurements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive Fisher forecast analysis of the Roman HLIS data, comparing with MCMC results and exploring the impact of priors and measurement biases on cosmological constraints.

Findings

GGL+clustering constraints surpass cosmic shear alone.

Combining all three probes yields moderate improvements.

Tight priors on power spectrum shape significantly enhance constraints.

Abstract

The High Latitude Imaging Survey (HLIS) of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide powerful tests of cosmological models through sensitive measurements of cosmic shear, galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL), and galaxy clustering. As part of the HLIS Project Infrastructure Team's Data Challenge 1 (DC1), we carry out Fisher forecasts of cosmological parameter constraints from combinations of these probes, focusing on inverse-variance figures of merit (FoMs) for the parameters $\sigma_8$ and $\Omega_{\rm{m}}$, which scale the amplitude of weak lensing signals. We find good agreement between Fisher analysis and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis of the DC1 baseline data vector, and we exploit the flexibility of Fisher analysis to investigate varied priors on cosmological parameters and on nuisance parameters describing unknown biases in photometric redshifts or shear measurements. Given the benchmark DC1 priors, the forecast constraints from GGL+clustering are substantially stronger than those from cosmic shear, with the combination of all three probes (``$3\!\times\!2$pt'') providing moderate further improvement. Adding tight external priors on the power spectrum shape parameters $n_{\rm{s}}$, $\Omega_{\rm{b}}$, and $h_0$ can improve the $(\sigma_8, \Omega_{\rm{m}})$ FoMs by factors of $1.2$--$3.5$. The smallest scale angular bins provide much more information than the largest scale bins, and the highest redshift tomographic bins provide more information than the lowest redshift bins. Factor-of-two changes in the priors on photo-$z$ and shear biases, relative to the benchmark values based on anticipated calibration accuracy, produce changes of $\lesssim 20\%$ in FoMs, implying robust cosmological performance if this demanding level of accuracy can be achieved.