Tomographic cross correlations between galaxy surveys and the CMB gravitational lensing potential. Effect of the redshift bin mismatch

Abstract

Upcoming surveys of the large-scale structure of our Universe will employ a large coverage area of about half of the sky and will significantly increase the observational depth. With these surveys, we will be able to cross-correlate CMB gravitational lensing and galaxy surveys divided into narrow redshift bins to map the evolution of the cosmological parameters with redshift. In this paper, we study the effect of the redshift bin mismatch of objects that is due to photometric redshift errors in tomographic cross-correlation measurements. We used the code FLASK to create Monte Carlo simulations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and Planck CMB lensing convergence. We simulated log-normal fields and divided galaxies into nine redshift bins with the Gaussian and modified Lorentzian photometric redshift errors. To estimate the parameters, we used angular power spectra of CMB lensing and galaxy density contrast fields and the maximum likelihood estimation method. We show that even with simple Gaussian errors with a standard deviation of $\sigma(z)=0.02(1+z)$, the galaxy auto-power spectra in tomographic bins are offset by $2-15\%$. The estimated cross-power spectra between galaxy clustering and CMB lensing are also biased, with smaller deviations $<5\%$. As a result, the $\sigma_{8}$ parameter deviates between $0.2-1.2\,\sigma$ due to the redshift bin mismatch of the objects. We propose a computationally fast and robust method based on the scattering matrix approach of Zhang et al. (2010), to correct for the redshift bin mismatch of the objects. The estimates of the parameters in tomographic studies such as the linear galaxy bias, the cross-correlation amplitude, and $\sigma_{8}$ are biased due to the redshift bin mismatch of the objects. The biases in these parameters are alleviated with our scattering matrix approach.