Björn Malte Schäfer

Galaxy Alignments: An Overview

The alignments between galaxies, their underlying matter structures, and the cosmic web constitute vital ingredients for a comprehensive understanding of gravity, the nature of matter, and structure formation in the Universe. We provide an overview on the state of the art in the study of these alignment processes and their observational signatures, aimed at a non-specialist audience. The development of the field over the past one hundred years is briefly reviewed. We also discuss the impact of galaxy alignments on measurements of weak gravitational lensing, and discuss avenues for making theoretical and observational progress over the coming decade.

Galaxy alignments: Observations and impact on cosmology

Galaxy shapes are not randomly oriented, rather they are statistically aligned in a way that can depend on formation environment, history and galaxy type. Studying the alignment of galaxies can therefore deliver important information about the physics of galaxy formation and evolution as well as the growth of structure in the Universe. In this review paper we summarise key measurements of galaxy alignments, divided by galaxy type, scale and environment. We also cover the statistics and formalism necessary to understand the observations in the literature. With the emergence of weak gravitational lensing as a precision probe of cosmology, galaxy alignments have taken on an added importance because they can mimic cosmic shear, the effect of gravitational lensing by large-scale structure on observed galaxy shapes. This makes galaxy alignments, commonly referred to as intrinsic alignments, an important systematic effect in weak lensing studies. We quantify the impact of intrinsic alignments on cosmic shear surveys and finish by reviewing practical mitigation techniques which attempt to remove contamination by intrinsic alignments.

Galaxy Alignments: Theory, Modelling & Simulations

The shapes of galaxies are not randomly oriented on the sky. During the galaxy formation and evolution process, environment has a strong influence, as tidal gravitational fields in the large-scale structure tend to align nearby galaxies. Additionally, events such as galaxy mergers affect the relative alignments of both the shapes and angular momenta of galaxies throughout their history. These “intrinsic galaxy alignments” are known to exist, but are still poorly understood. This review will offer a pedagogical introduction to the current theories that describe intrinsic galaxy alignments, including the apparent difference in intrinsic alignment between early- and late-type galaxies and the latest efforts to model them analytically. It will then describe the ongoing efforts to simulate intrinsic alignments using both N

Weak gravitational lensing with deimos

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Constraints on early dark energy from CMB lensing and weak lensing tomography

-body and hydrodynamic simulations. Due to the relative youth of this field, there is still much to be done to understand intrinsic galaxy alignments and this review summarises the current state of the field, providing a solid basis for future work.

Weak lensing tomography with orthogonal polynomials

We introduce a novel method for weak-lensing measurements, which is based on a mathematically exact deconvolution of the moments of the apparent brightness distribution of galaxies from the telescopes point spread function (PSF). No assumptions on the shape of the galaxy or the PSF are made. The (de)convolution equations are exact for unweighted moments only, while in practice a compact weight function needs to be applied to the noisy images to ensure that the moment measurement yields significant results. We employ a Gaussian weight function, whose centroid and ellipticity are iteratively adjusted to match the corresponding quantities of the source. The change of the moments caused by the application of the weight function can then be corrected by considering higher order weighted moments of the same source. Because of the form of the deconvolution equations, even an incomplete weighting correction leads to an excellent shear estimation if galaxies and PSF are measured with a weight function of identical size. We demonstrate the accuracy and capabilities of this new method in the context of weak gravitational lensing measurements with a set of specialized tests and show its competitive performance on the GREAT08 Challenge data. A complete c++ implementation of the method can be requested from the authors.

The integrated Sachs–Wolfe effect in cosmologies with coupled dark matter and dark energy

Dark energy can be studied by its influence on the expansion of the Universe as well as on the growth history of the large-scale structure. In this paper, we follow the growth of the cosmic density field in early dark energy cosmologies by combining observations of the primary CMB temperature and polarisation power spectra at high redshift, of the CMB lensing deflection field at intermediate redshift and of weak cosmic shear at low redshifts for constraining the allowed amount of early dark energy. We present these forecasts using the Fisher matrix formalism and consider the combination of Planck data with the weak lensing survey of Euclid. We find that combining these data sets gives powerful constraints on early dark energy and is able to break degeneracies in the parameter set inherent to the various observational channels. The derived statistical 1σ-bound on the early dark energy density parameter is σ(Ωed) = 0.0022 which suggests that early dark energy models can be well examined in our approach. In addition, we derive the dark energy figure of merit for the considered dark energy parameterisation and comment on the applicability of the growth index to early dark energy cosmologies.

Born-corrections to weak lensing of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization anisotropies

The topic of this paper is weak cosmic shear tomography where the line-of-sight weighting is carried out with a set of specifically constructed orthogonal polynomials, dubbed Tomography with Orthogonal Radial Distance Polynomial Systems (TaRDiS). We investigate the properties of these polynomials and employ weak convergence spectra, which have been obtained by weighting with these polynomials, for the estimation of cosmological parameters. We quantify their power in constraining parameters in a Fisher matrix technique and demonstrate how each polynomial projects out statistically independent information, and how the combination of multiple polynomials lifts degeneracies. The assumption of a reference cosmology is needed for the construction of the polynomials, and as a last point we investigate how errors in the construction with a wrong cosmological model propagate to misestimates in cosmological parameters. TaRDiS performs on a similar level as traditional tomographic methods and some key features of tomography are made easier to understand.

Investigating clustering dark energy with 3D weak cosmic shear

The subject of this paper is the derivation of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (iSW) effect in cosmologies with coupled dark matter and dark energy fluids. These couplings influence the iSW effect in three ways: the Hubble function assumes a different scaling, the structure growth rate shows a different time evolution and, in addition, the Poisson equation, which relates the density perturbations to fluctuations in the gravitational potential, is changed, due to the violation of the scaling p α a -3 of the matter density p with scalefactor a. Exemplarily, I derive the iSW spectra for a model in which dark matter decays into dark energy, investigate the influence of the dark matter decay rate and the dark energy equation of state on the iSW signal, and discuss the analogies for gravitational lensing. Quite generally, iSW measurements should reach similar accuracy in determining the dark energy equation of state parameter and the coupling constant.

On the validity of the Born approximation for weak cosmic flexions

Many weak lensing calculations make use of the Born approximation where the light ray is approximated by a straight path. We examine the effect of Born-corrections for lensing of the cosmic microwave background in an analytical approach by taking perturbative corrections to the geodesic into account. The resulting extra power in the lensing potential spectrum is comparable to the power generated by nonlinear structure formation and affects especially the polarisation spectra, leading to relative changes of the order of one per cent for the