First Evidence of Intrinsic Alignments of Red Galaxies at z > 1: Cross Correlation between CFHTLenS and FastSound Samples

We report the first evidence for intrinsic alignment (IA) of red galaxies at z > 1. We measure the gravitational shear-intrinsic ellipticity cross correlation function at z ∼ 1.3 using galaxy positions from the FastSound spectroscopic survey and galaxy shapes from the Canada France Hawaii telescope lensing survey data. Adopting the nonlinear alignment model, we obtain a 2.4σ level detection of the IA amplitude A LA = 27.48 − 11.54 + 11.53 (and 2.6σ with A LA = 29.43 − 11.49 + 11.48 when weak lensing contaminations are taken into account), which is larger than the value extrapolated from the constraints obtained at lower redshifts. Our measured IA is translated into a ∼20% contamination of the weak-lensing power spectrum for the red galaxies. This marginal detection of IA for red galaxies at z > 1 motivates the continuing investigation of the nature of IA for weak lensing studies. Furthermore, our result provides the first step to utilize IA measurements in future high-z surveys as a cosmological probe, complementary to galaxy clustering and lensing.

Weak-lensing Mass Reconstruction of Galaxy Clusters with a Convolutional Neural Network

We introduce a novel method for reconstructing the projected matter distributions of galaxy clusters with weak-lensing (WL) data based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). Training data sets are generated with ray-tracing through cosmological simulations. We control the noise level of the galaxy shear catalog such that it mimics the typical properties of the existing ground-based WL observations of galaxy clusters. We find that the mass reconstruction by our multilayered CNN with the architecture of alternating convolution and trans-convolution filters significantly outperforms the traditional reconstruction methods. The CNN method provides better pixel-to-pixel correlations with the truth, restores more accurate positions of the mass peaks, and more efficiently suppresses artifacts near the field edges. In addition, the CNN mass reconstruction lifts the mass-sheet degeneracy when applied to our projected cluster mass estimation from sufficiently large fields. This implies that this CNN algorithm can be used to measure the cluster masses in a model-independent way for future wide-field WL surveys.

A Novel Framework for Modeling Weakly Lensing Shear Using Kinematics and Imaging at Moderate Redshift

Kinematic weak lensing describes the distortion of a galaxy’s projected velocity field due to lensing shear, an effect recently reported for the first time by Gurri et al. based on a sample of 18 galaxies at z ∼ 0.1. In this paper, we develop a new formalism that combines the shape information from imaging surveys with the kinematic information from resolved spectroscopy to better constrain the lensing distortion of source galaxies and to potentially address systematic errors that affect conventional weak-lensing analyses. Using a Bayesian forward model applied to mock galaxy observations, we model distortions in the source galaxy’s velocity field simultaneously with the apparent shear-induced offset between the kinematic and photometric major axes. We show that this combination dramatically reduces the statistical uncertainty on the inferred shear, yielding statistical error gains of a factor of 2–6 compared to kinematics alone. While we have not accounted for errors from intrinsic kinematic irregularities, our approach opens kinematic lensing studies to higher redshifts where resolved spectroscopy is more challenging. For example, we show that ground-based integral-field spectroscopy of background galaxies at z ∼ 0.7 can deliver gravitational shear measurements with signal-to-noise ratio of ∼1 per source galaxy at 1 arcminute separations from a galaxy cluster at z ∼ 0.3. This suggests that even modest samples observed with existing instruments could deliver improved galaxy cluster mass measurements and well-sampled probes of their halo mass profiles to large radii.

Weak lensing magnification reconstruction with the modified internal linear combination method

Measuring weak lensing cosmic magnification signal is very challenging due to the overwhelming intrinsic clustering in the observed galaxy distribution. In this paper, we modify the Internal Linear Combination (ILC) method to reconstruct the lensing signal with an extra constraint to suppress the intrinsic clustering. To quantify the performance, we construct a realistic galaxy catalogue for the LSST-like photometric survey, covering 20 000 deg2 with mean source redshift at zs ∼ 1. We find that the reconstruction performance depends on the width of the photo-z bin we choose. Due to the correlation between the lensing signal and the source galaxy distribution, the derived signal has smaller systematic bias but larger statistical uncertainty for a narrower photo-z bin. We conclude that the lensing signal reconstruction with the Modified ILC method is unbiased with a statistical uncertainty <5% for bin width Δ zP = 0.2.