Monday, February 13, 2012

1202.2332 (Joachim Harnois-Deraps et al.)

Gravitational Lensing Simulations I : Covariance Matrices and Halo Catalogues    [PDF]

Joachim Harnois-Deraps, Sanaz Vafaei, Ludovic Van Waerbeke
Gravitational lensing surveys have now become large and precise enough that the interpretation of the lensing signal in current and future surveys has to take into account an increasing number of theoretical limitations and observational biases. Since much of the lensing signal is stronger in the non-linear scales, only numerical simulations can reproduce accurately enough the various effects one has to take into account. This work is the first of a series in which all gravitational lensing corrections known so far will be implemented in the same set of simulations using realistic mock catalogues. In this first paper, we present the TCS simulation suite and compare basic statistics such as the second and third order convergence and shear correlation functions to predictions for a large range of scales and redshifts. These simple tests set the range of validity of our simulations. We also compute the non-Gaussian covariance matrices of several statistical estimators, some of them are used in the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). From the same realizations, we construct halo catalogues and present a series of halo properties that are required by most galaxy population algorithms.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2332

No comments:

Post a Comment