Precise photometric redshifts with a narrow-band filter set: The PAU Survey at the William Herschel Telescope

Carles S\'anchez; Enrique Gazta\~naga; Francisco J. Castander; Martin Eriksen; Pol Mart\'i; Ramon Miquel

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Precise photometric redshifts with a narrow-band filter set: The PAU Survey at the William Herschel Telescope

Pol Martí, Ramon Miquel, Francisco J. Castander, Enrique Gaztañaga, Martin Eriksen, Carles Sánchez

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Submitted 13 Feb 2014

abstract compiled · 2026-09-23 · no language-model review

The authors' main claim Finally, we also study the impact on the photo-z performance of small variations of the filter set in terms of width, wavelength coverage, etc., and find a broad region where slightly modified filter sets provide similar results, with the original set being close to optimal.

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arXiv ID1402.3220 (version 2)

Pith IDTX6R6L3I, Pith's permanent record of this paper and its review

CitationCarles S\'anchez, Enrique Gazta\~naga, Francisco J. Castander, Martin Eriksen, Pol Mart\'i, Ramon Miquel. "Precise photometric redshifts with a narrow-band filter set: The PAU Survey at the William Herschel Telescope." arXiv:1402.3220 (2014). https://pith.science/paper/TX6R6L3I

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What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.04 · states limitation 0.35 · human participants 0.02 · controlled comparison 0.13 · randomized assignment 0.01 · states quantitative result 0.97 · compares with prior results 0.13 · mentions code or data availability 0.03.

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arXiv listing abstract v2. Results and the main claim are underlined; show every role.

The Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) survey at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) will use a new optical camera (PAUCam) with a large set of narrow-band filters to perform a photometric galaxy survey with a quasi-spectroscopic redshift precision of \sigma(z)/(1 + z) ~ 0.0035 and map the large-scale structure of the universe in three dimensions up to i_AB < 22.5-23.0. In this paper we present a detailed photo-z performance study using photometric simulations for 40 equally-spaced 12.5-nm-wide (FWHM) filters with a ~25% overlap and spanning the wavelength range from 450 nm to 850 nm, together with a ugrizY broad-band filter system. We then present the migration matrix r_ij, containing the probability that a galaxy in a true redshift bin j is measured in a photo-z bin i, and study its effect on the determination of galaxy auto- and cross-correlations. Finally, we also study the impact on the photo-z performance of small variations of the filter set in terms of width, wavelength coverage, etc., and find a broad region where slightly modified filter sets provide similar results, with the original set being close to optimal.

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What the classifier reports for each sentence. The number is the probability it gave the label.
#	sentence	role	the authors' own work	states the main conclusion	strength
s0	The Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) survey at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) will use a new optical camera (PAUCam) with a large set of narrow-band filters to perform a photometric galaxy survey with a quasi-spectroscopic redshift precision of \sigma(z)/(1 + z) ~ 0.0035 and map the large-scale structure of the universe in three dimensions up to i_AB < 22.5-23.0.	background 0.40	0.26	0.24	asserted 0.96
s1	In this paper we present a detailed photo-z performance study using photometric simulations for 40 equally-spaced 12.5-nm-wide (FWHM) filters with a ~25% overlap and spanning the wavelength range from 450 nm to 850 nm, together with a ugrizY broad-band filter system.	method 0.72	0.92	0.06	asserted 0.98
s2	We then present the migration matrix r_ij, containing the probability that a galaxy in a true redshift bin j is measured in a photo-z bin i, and study its effect on the determination of galaxy auto- and cross-correlations.	contribution 0.79	0.95	0.07	asserted 0.97
s3	Finally, we also study the impact on the photo-z performance of small variations of the filter set in terms of width, wavelength coverage, etc., and find a broad region where slightly modified filter sets provide similar results, with the original set being close to optimal.	result 0.95	0.96	0.41	asserted 1.00

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: simulation study 0.97 · evidence from simulation or computation 1.00.

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arXiv listing abstract v2

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full text
figures and tables
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The paper

Original abstract

The Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) survey at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) will use a new optical camera (PAUCam) with a large set of narrow-band filters to perform a photometric galaxy survey with a quasi-spectroscopic redshift precision of \sigma(z)/(1 + z) ~ 0.0035 and map the large-scale structure of the universe in three dimensions up to i_AB < 22.5-23.0. In this paper we present a detailed photo-z performance study using photometric simulations for 40 equally-spaced 12.5-nm-wide (FWHM) filters with a ~25% overlap and spanning the wavelength range from 450 nm to 850 nm, together with a ugrizY broad-band filter system. We then present the migration matrix r_ij, containing the probability that a galaxy in a true redshift bin j is measured in a photo-z bin i, and study its effect on the determination of galaxy auto- and cross-correlations. Finally, we also study the impact on the photo-z performance of small variations of the filter set in terms of width, wavelength coverage, etc., and find a broad region where slightly modified filter sets provide similar results, with the original set being close to optimal.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing
astro-ph.CO 2021-05 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

DES Y3 3x2pt analysis constrains S8=0.776±0.017 and Ωm=0.339±0.032 in flat ΛCDM, consistent with Planck CMB results at p=0.13-0.48.
The PAU Survey: Active galactic nucleus galaxies in galaxy pairs
astro-ph.GA 2026-10 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

PAUS data reveals that AGNs in galaxy pairs become redder at z>0.6 and are preferentially found in morphologically disturbed, close pairs, indicating a redshift-dependent link between interactions and AGN activity.
S-PLUS Clusters And Large-scale Environments (SCALE): II. PZWav versus redMaPPer identification of eRosita groups
astro-ph.CO 2026-07 accept novelty 5.0 of 10

A probabilistic Hausdorff-distance matching of PZWav/AME optical systems to eRASS1 X-ray contours yields multi-wavelength group/cluster catalogs with tunable purity and improved low-mass completeness versus redMaPPer.
Cosmology with the SPHEREX All-Sky Spectral Survey
astro-ph.CO 2014-12 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

A proposed all-sky infrared spectroscopic survey would measure the local primordial non-Gaussianity parameter f_NL to about 0.2, enough to discriminate single-field from multi-field inflation, according to Fisher fore...

How the literature uses it

5 arXiv papers cite this in 5 sentences

Each citing sentence is taken from the citing paper's LaTeX source and typed by Pith's classifier. A label appears at probability 0.8 or more (0.95 for support), a contest at 0.7 or more; the quoted words are the citing authors'. How each label was checked · JSON

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Uses its data or values 1 paper

A redshift distribution is inferred for each of the deep-field galaxy phenotypes using overlapping spectroscopic [ref] , and photometric COSMOS [ref] and PAUS [ref] redshift measurements.

Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing · Photometric redshifts · 0.93

Cites it as background 3 papers

Among the current and future spectro-photometric surveys we have PAU [ref] , J-PLUS [ref] and the future J-PAS [ref] .

J-PAS: Forecasts for dark matter - dark energy elastic couplings · Introduction · 0.93
Examples of spectro-photometric surveys are PAU [ref] J-PLUS [ref] and the future J-PAS [ref] .

The Fisher gAlaxy suRvey cOde ($\texttt{FARO}$) · Introduction · 0.87
Huge experimental efforts have been made to better understand the expansion of the Universe, see for instance [ref] , [ref] [ref] , [ref] , [ref] for details on the surveys of Euclid, DES and PAU.

Comparison of piecewise-constant methods for dark energy · Introduction · 0.98

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