UNIONS-3500 Weak Lensing: IV. 2D cosmological constraints in harmonic space

TL;DR

This paper presents a harmonic-space cosmic shear analysis of the UNIONS survey data, constraining cosmological parameters within the mbda CDM model and assessing systematic effects and analysis robustness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel harmonic-space pseudo-ll estimator for cosmic shear in the UNIONS survey, including systematic modeling and comparison with configuration-space results.

Findings

Measured S8 = 0.891^{+0.057}_{-0.084}, consistent with Planck.

Found a 2.18 sigma agreement between harmonic and configuration space results.

Identified intrinsic alignment amplitude as a major uncertainty source.

Abstract

The Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) is a photometric survey in the northern sky. The quality of the data in the $r$ band provides precise shape measurements to measure the growth of structures using cosmic shear. This work aims to constrain cosmological parameters using a harmonic-space estimator of the cosmic shear signal, known as pseudo-$C_\ell$, in a non-tomographic analysis. We perform our analysis in the context of the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. We model astrophysical systematic effects such as baryonic feedback and intrinsic alignments of galaxies. We verify that the point spread function systematic contribution does not affect our results. We assess the impact of different scale cuts and modelling choices on the constraints. We find $S_8 \equiv \sigma_8 \sqrt{\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3} = 0.891^{+0.057}_{-0.084}$, consistent at the $0.79 \, \sigma$ level with \emph{Planck} and between $0.87$ to $1.51 \, \sigma$ with other weak lensing surveys. Our results are robust to analysis choices, and we use lognormal simulations to assess the consistency between configuration and harmonic space results, finding a $2.18 \, \sigma$ agreement between the two statistics. The degeneracy between $S_8$ and the amplitude of the intrinsic alignment, $A_{\rm IA}$, sampled from a prior obtained from direct measurements, is one of the largest sources of uncertainty. This work is part of the first cosmological analysis of the UNIONS survey using cosmic shear and paves the way for future tomographic and $3 \times 2$ point cross-correlation analyses, exploiting the unique overlap of UNIONS with deep spectroscopic surveys in the northern hemisphere.