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Intrinsic alignment-lensing interference as a contaminant of cosmic shear

9 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

9 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Cosmic shear surveys have great promise as tools for precision cosmology, but can be subject to systematic errors including intrinsic ellipticity correlations of the source galaxies. The intrinsic alignments are believed to be small for deep surveys, but this is based on intrinsic and lensing distortions being uncorrelated. Here we show that the gravitational lensing shear and intrinsic shear need not be independent: correlations between the tidal field and the intrinsic shear cause the intrinsic shear of nearby galaxies to be correlated with the gravitational shear acting on more distant galaxies. We estimate the magnitude of this effect for two simple intrinsic alignment models: one in which the galaxy ellipticity is linearly related to the tidal field, and one in which it is quadratic in the tidal field as suggested by tidal torque theory. The first model predicts a gravitational-intrinsic (GI) correlation that can be much greater than the intrinsic-intrinsic (II) correlation for broad redshift distributions, and that remains when galaxies pairs at similar redshifts are rejected. The second model, in its simplest form, predicts no gravitational-intrinsic correlation. In the first model and assuming a normalization consistent with recently claimed detections of intrinsic correlations we find that the GI correlation term can exceed the usual II term by >1 order of magnitude and the intrinsic correlation induced B-mode by 2 orders of magnitude. These interference effects can suppress the lensing power spectrum for a single broad redshift bin by of order ~10% at z_s=1 and ~30% at z_s=0.5.

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representative citing papers

Parity Violation in Galaxy Shapes: Primordial Non-Gaussianity

astro-ph.CO · 2025-09-10 · conditional · novelty 6.0

The parity-odd intrinsic alignment power spectrum probes the collapsed limit of the parity-odd primordial trispectrum and can tighten constraints on parity-violating PNG when bias parameters are calibrated from N-body simulations.

Balancing bias, baryons, and scale cuts in LSST 3x2pt analysis

astro-ph.CO · 2026-06-09 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

A minimal bias model yields unbiased LambdaCDM constraints up to k_max=0.7 h/Mpc but biases neutrino mass estimates, while higher-order bias mimics baryonic suppression in LSST 3x2pt analyses using the new MGL pipeline.

Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters

astro-ph.CO · 2018-07-17 · accept · novelty 5.0

Final Planck CMB data confirms the flat 6-parameter ΛCDM model with Ω_c h² = 0.120 ± 0.001, Ω_b h² = 0.0224 ± 0.0001, n_s = 0.965 ± 0.004, τ = 0.054 ± 0.007, H_0 = 67.4 ± 0.5 km/s/Mpc, and no strong evidence for extensions.

The sound of dynamical dark energy and modified gravity

astro-ph.CO · 2026-05-29 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Using CMB, SN, BAO and shear data, the work shows dynamical dark energy in MG models correlates with deviations from GR below z=2 at >95% CL, a link that holds for varying sound speed but vanishes for a cosmological constant.

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