Cosmic shear without shape noise

Abstract

We describe a new method for reducing the shape noise in weak lensing measurements by an order of magnitude. Our method relies on spectroscopic measurements of disk galaxy rotation and makes use of the Tully-Fisher relation in order to control for the intrinsic orientations of galaxy disks. For this new proposed method, so-called Kinematic Lensing (KL), the shape noise ceases to be an important source of statistical error. We use the CosmoLike software package to simulate likelihood analyses for two Kinematic Lensing survey concepts (roughly similar in scale to Dark Energy Survey Task Force Stage III and Stage IV missions) and compare their constraining power to a cosmic shear survey from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Our forecasts in seven-dimensional cosmological parameter space include statistical uncertainties resulting from shape noise, cosmic variance, halo sample variance, and higher-order moments of the density field. We marginalize over systematic uncertainties arising from photometric redshift errors and shear calibration biases considering both optimistic and conservative assumptions about LSST systematic errors. We find that even the KL-Stage III is highly competitive with the optimistic LSST scenario, while evading the most important sources of theoretical and observational systematic error inherent in traditional weak lensing techniques. Furthermore, the KL technique enables a narrow-bin cosmic shear tomography approach to tightly constrain time-dependent signatures in the dark energy phenomenon.