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arXiv · 1901.06495

Rainbow Cosmic Shear: Optimisation of Tomographic Bins

T. D. Kitching·P. L. Taylor·P. Capak·D. Masters·H. Hoekstra
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Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of finding optimal cosmic shear tomographic bins. We generalise the definition of a cosmic shear tomographic bin to be a set of commonly labelled voxels in photometric colour space; rather than bins defined directly in redshift. We explore this approach by using a self-organising map to define the multi-dimensional colour space, and a we define a 'label space' of connected regions on the self-organising map using overlapping elliptical disks. This allows us to then find optimal labelling schemes by searching the label space. We use a metric that is the signal-to-noise ratio of a dark energy equation of state measurement, and in this case we find that for up to five tomographic bins the optimal colour-space labelling is an approximation of an equally-spaced binning in redshift; that is in all cases the best configuration. We also show that such a redefinition is more robust to photometric redshift outliers than a standard tomographic bin selection.

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T. D. Kitching, P. L. Taylor, P. Capak, D. Masters, H. Hoekstra. 2019-01-19. Rainbow Cosmic Shear: Optimisation of Tomographic Bins. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.99.063536

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