Precision photometric redshift calibration for galaxy–galaxy weak lensing

Creators: Mandelbaum, R.; Seljak, U.; Hirata, C. M.; Bardelli, S.; Bolzonella, M.; Bongiorno, A.; Carollo, M.; Contini, T.; Cunha, C. E.; Garilli, B.; Iovino, A.; Kampczyk, P.; Kneib, J.-P.; Knobel, C.; Koo, D. C.; Lamareille, F.; Le Fèvre, O.; Leborgne, J.-F.; Lilly, S. J.; Maier, C.; Mainieri, V.; Mignoli, M.; Newman, J. A.; Oesch, P. A.; Perez-Montero, E.; Ricciardelli, E.; Scodeggio, M.; Silverman, J.; Tasca, L.

Abstract

Accurate photometric redshifts are among the key requirements for precision weak lensing measurements. Both the large size of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the existence of large spectroscopic redshift samples that are flux-limited beyond its depth have made it the optimal data source for developing methods to properly calibrate photometric redshifts for lensing. Here, we focus on galaxy–galaxy lensing in a survey with spectroscopic lens redshifts, as in the SDSS. We develop statistics that quantify the effect of source redshift errors on the lensing calibration and on the weighting scheme, and show how they can be used in the presence of redshift failure and sampling variance. We then demonstrate their use with 2838 source galaxies with spectroscopy from DEEP2 and zCOSMOS, evaluating several public photometric redshift algorithms, in two cases including a full p(z) for each object, and find lensing calibration biases as low as <1 per cent (due to fortuitous cancellation of two types of bias) or as high as 20 per cent for methods in active use (despite the small mean photoz bias of these algorithms). Our work demonstrates that lensing-specific statistics must be used to reliably calibrate the lensing signal, due to asymmetric effects of (frequently non-Gaussian) photoz errors. We also demonstrate that large-scale structure (LSS) can strongly impact the photoz calibration and its error estimation, due to a correlation between the LSS and the photoz errors, and argue that at least two independent degree-scale spectroscopic samples are needed to suppress its effects. Given the size of our spectroscopic sample, we can reduce the galaxy–galaxy lensing calibration error well below current SDSS statistical errors.

Additional Information

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 RAS. Accepted 2008 January 10. Received 2007 December 21; in original form 2007 September 11. RM is supported by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF-01199.02-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. US is supported by the Packard Foundation and NSF CAREER-0132953, and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). We thank Josh Frieman, Marcos Lima, Huan Lin, Hiro Oyaizu, Nikhil Padmanabhan and Erin Sheldon for useful discussion about a variety of topics addressed in this paper. Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS web site is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory and the University of Washington. Funding for the DEEP2 survey has been provided by NSF grants AST-0071048, AST-0071198, AST-0507428 and AST-0507483. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W.M. Keck Foundation. The DEEP2 team and Keck Observatory acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community and appreciate the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Based in part on observations undertaken at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) under Large Programme 175.A-0839. [R.M. was a] Hubble Fellow.

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