QSO Lensing Magnification: A Comparison of 2QZ and SDSS Results

Abstract

The lensing of background QSOs by foreground galaxies is a powerful probe of the mass density of the Universe and the power spectrum of mass clustering. However, the 2dF QSO survey suggested that a strong anticorrelation effect at g<21 was seen for both galaxies and clusters which implied that galaxies are anti-biased (b~0.1) on small scales at a higher level than predicted by the standard cosmology (Myers et al., 2003, 2005) whereas results from SDSS suggested that the effect was much smaller (b~0.6) and in line with standard expectations (Scranton et al., 2005). We first cross-correlate the SDSS photo-z, g<21, 1.0<z_p<2.2 QSOs with g<21 galaxies and clusters in the same areas. These results are somewhat less negative than the results based on the 2QZ QSOs found by Myers et al. But contamination of the QSOs by low-z NELGs and QSOs can cause underestimation of the anticorrelation lensing signal. When a correction is applied to the photo-z QSO sample of Scranton et al. the anticorrelation increases and the agreement with the results of Myers et al. is improved. When we also take into account the fainter r<21 galaxy limit of Scranton et al. as opposed to g<21 for Myers et al., the two observational results appear to be in very good agreement. This therefore leaves open the question of why the theoretical interpretations are so different for these analyses. We note that the results of Guimaraes, Myers & Shanks based on mock catalogues from the LCDM Hubble Volume strongly suggest that QSO lensing at the levels detected by both Myers et al. and now Scranton et al. is incompatible with a galaxy bias of b~1 in the standard cosmological model. If the QSO lensing results are correct then the consequences for cosmology may be significant (see Shanks 2006).