arXiv subjects

S. L. Bridle

Publications and source records attributed to S. L. Bridle.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Weak Lensing Shape Catalogues

We present two galaxy shape catalogues from the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 data set, covering 1500 square degrees with a median redshift of $0.59$. The catalogues cover two main fields: Stripe 82, and an area overlapping the South Pole Telescope survey region. We describe our data analysis process and in particular our shape measurement using two independent shear measurement pipelines, METACALIBRATION and IM3SHAPE. The METACALIBRATION catalogue uses a Gaussian model with an innovative internal calibration scheme, and was applied to $riz$-bands, yielding 34.8M objects. The IM3SHAPE catalogue uses a maximum-likelihood bulge/disc model calibrated using simulations, and was applied to $r$-band data, yielding 21.9M objects. Both catalogues pass a suite of null tests that demonstrate their fitness for use in weak lensing science. We estimate the 1$σ$ uncertainties in multiplicative shear calibration to be $0.013$ and $0.025$ for the METACALIBRATION and IM3SHAPE catalogues, respectively.

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arXiv2018

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Galaxy clustering for combined probes

We measure the clustering of DES Year 1 galaxies that are intended to be combined with weak lensing samples in order to produce precise cosmological constraints from the joint analysis of large-scale structure and lensing correlations. Two-point correlation functions are measured for a sample of $6.6 \times 10^{5}$ luminous red galaxies selected using the \textsc{redMaGiC} algorithm over an area of $1321$ square degrees, in the redshift range $0.15 < z < 0.9$, split into five tomographic redshift bins. The sample has a mean redshift uncertainty of $σ_{z}/(1+z) = 0.017$. We quantify and correct spurious correlations induced by spatially variable survey properties, testing their impact on the clustering measurements and covariance. We demonstrate the sample's robustness by testing for stellar contamination, for potential biases that could arise from the systematic correction, and for the consistency between the two-point auto- and cross-correlation functions. We show that the corrections we apply have a significant impact on the resultant measurement of cosmological parameters, but that the results are robust against arbitrary choices in the correction method. We find the linear galaxy bias in each redshift bin in a fiducial cosmology to be $b(z$=$0.24)=1.40 \pm 0.08$, $b(z$=$0.38)=1.61 \pm 0.05$, $b(z$=$0.53)=1.60 \pm 0.04$ for galaxies with luminosities $L/L_*>$$0.5$, $b(z$=$0.68)=1.93 \pm 0.05$ for $L/L_*>$$1$ and $b(z$=$0.83)=1.99 \pm 0.07$ for $L/L_*$$>1.5$, broadly consistent with expectations for the redshift and luminosity dependence of the bias of red galaxies. We show these measurements to be consistent with the linear bias obtained from tangential shear measurements.

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arXiv2018

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Measurement of the Galaxy Angular Power Spectrum

We use data from the first-year (Y1) observations of the DES collaboration to measure the galaxy angular power spectrum (APS), and search for its BAO feature using a template-fitting method. We test our methodology in a sample of 1800 DES Y1-like mock catalogs. The APS is measured with the pseudo-$C_\ell$ method, using pixelized maps constructed from the mock catalogs and the DES mask. The covariance matrix of the $C_\ell$'s in these tests are also obtained from the mock catalogs. We use templates to model the measured spectra and estimate template parameters firstly from the $C_\ell$'s of the mocks using two different methods, a maximum likelihood estimator and a MCMC, finding consistent results with a good reduced $χ^2$. Robustness tests are performed to estimate the impact of different choices of settings used in our analysis. After these tests on mocks, we apply our method to a galaxy sample constructed from DES Y1 data specifically for LSS studies. This catalog comprises galaxies within an effective area of 1318 deg$^2$ and $0.6<z<1.0$. We fit the observed spectra with our optimized templates, considering models with and without BAO features. We find that the DES Y1 data favors a model with BAO at the $2.6\,σ$ C.L. with a best-fit shift parameter of $α=1.023\pm 0.047$. However, the goodness-of-fit is somewhat poor, with $χ^2/$(dof) = 1.49. We identify a possible cause of this issue and show that using a theoretical covariance matrix obtained from $C_\ell$'s that are better adjusted to data results in an improved value of $χ^2/$(dof) = 1.36 which is similar to the value obtained with the real-space analysis. Our results correspond to a distance measurement of $D_A(z_{\rm eff} = 0.81)/r_d = 10.65 \pm 0.49$, consistent with the main DES BAO findings. This is a companion paper to the main DES BAO article showing the details of the harmonic space analysis.

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arXiv2018

Density split statistics: Cosmological constraints from counts and lensing in cells in DES Y1 and SDSS data

We derive cosmological constraints from the probability distribution function (PDF) of evolved large-scale matter density fluctuations. We do this by splitting lines of sight by density based on their count of tracer galaxies, and by measuring both gravitational shear around and counts-in-cells in overdense and underdense lines of sight, in Dark Energy Survey (DES) First Year and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data. Our analysis uses a perturbation theory model (see companion paper Friedrich at al.) and is validated using N-body simulation realizations and log-normal mocks. It allows us to constrain cosmology, bias and stochasticity of galaxies w.r.t. matter density and, in addition, the skewness of the matter density field. From a Bayesian model comparison, we find that the data weakly prefer a connection of galaxies and matter that is stochastic beyond Poisson fluctuations on <=20 arcmin angular smoothing scale. The two stochasticity models we fit yield DES constraints on the matter density $Ω_m=0.26^{+0.04}_{-0.03}$ and $Ω_m=0.28^{+0.05}_{-0.04}$ that are consistent with each other. These values also agree with the DES analysis of galaxy and shear two-point functions (3x2pt) that only uses second moments of the PDF. Constraints on $σ_8$ are model dependent ($σ_8=0.97^{+0.07}_{-0.06}$ and $0.80^{+0.06}_{-0.07}$ for the two stochasticity models), but consistent with each other and with the 3x2pt results if stochasticity is at the low end of the posterior range. As an additional test of gravity, counts and lensing in cells allow to compare the skewness $S_3$ of the matter density PDF to its LCDM prediction. We find no evidence of excess skewness in any model or data set, with better than 25 per cent relative precision in the skewness estimate from DES alone.

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arXiv2018

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Cosmic Shear

We use 26 million galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 shape catalogs over 1321 deg$^2$ of the sky to produce the most significant measurement of cosmic shear in a galaxy survey to date. We constrain cosmological parameters in both the flat $Λ$CDM and $w$CDM models, while also varying the neutrino mass density. These results are shown to be robust using two independent shape catalogs, two independent \photoz\ calibration methods, and two independent analysis pipelines in a blind analysis. We find a 3.5\% fractional uncertainty on $σ_8(Ω_m/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.782^{+0.027}_{-0.027}$ at 68\% CL, which is a factor of 2.5 improvement over the fractional constraining power of our DES Science Verification results. In $w$CDM, we find a 4.8\% fractional uncertainty on $σ_8(Ω_m/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.777^{+0.036}_{-0.038}$ and a dark energy equation-of-state $w=-0.95^{+0.33}_{-0.39}$. We find results that are consistent with previous cosmic shear constraints in $σ_8$ -- $Ω_m$, and see no evidence for disagreement of our weak lensing data with data from the CMB. Finally, we find no evidence preferring a $w$CDM model allowing $w\ne -1$. We expect further significant improvements with subsequent years of DES data, which will more than triple the sky coverage of our shape catalogs and double the effective integrated exposure time per galaxy.

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arXiv2017

Galaxy bias from galaxy-galaxy lensing in the DES Science Verification Data

We present a measurement of galaxy-galaxy lensing around a magnitude-limited ($i_{AB} < 22.5$) sample of galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification (DES-SV) data. We split these lenses into three photometric-redshift bins from 0.2 to 0.8, and determine the product of the galaxy bias $b$ and cross-correlation coefficient between the galaxy and dark matter overdensity fields $r$ in each bin, using scales above 4 Mpc/$h$ comoving, where we find the linear bias model to be valid given our current uncertainties. We compare our galaxy bias results from galaxy-galaxy lensing with those obtained from galaxy clustering (Crocce et al. 2016) and CMB lensing (Giannantonio et al. 2016) for the same sample of galaxies, and find our measurements to be in good agreement with those in Crocce et al. (2016), while, in the lowest redshift bin ($z\sim0.3$), they show some tension with the findings in Giannantonio et al. (2016). We measure $b\cdot r$ to be $0.87\pm 0.11$, $1.12 \pm 0.16$ and $1.24\pm 0.23$, respectively for the three redshift bins of width $Δz = 0.2$ in the range $0.2<z <0.8$, defined with the photometric-redshift algorithm BPZ. Using a different code to split the lens sample, TPZ, leads to changes in the measured biases at the 10-20\% level, but it does not alter the main conclusion of this work: when comparing with Crocce et al. (2016) we do not find strong evidence for a cross-correlation parameter significantly below one in this galaxy sample, except possibly at the lowest redshift bin ($z\sim 0.3$), where we find $r = 0.71 \pm 0.11$ when using TPZ, and $0.83 \pm 0.12$ with BPZ.

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arXiv2017

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: The Impact of Galaxy Neighbours on Weak Lensing Cosmology with im3shape

We use a suite of simulated images based on Year 1 of the Dark Energy Survey to explore the impact of galaxy neighbours on shape measurement and shear cosmology. The hoopoe image simulations include realistic blending, galaxy positions, and spatial variations in depth and PSF properties. Using the im3shape maximum-likelihood shape measurement code, we identify four mechanisms by which neighbours can have a non-negligible influence on shear estimation. These effects, if ignored, would contribute a net multiplicative bias of $m \sim 0.03 - 0.09$ in the DES Y1 im3shape catalogue, though the precise impact will be dependent on both the measurement code and the selection cuts applied. This can be reduced to percentage level or less by removing objects with close neighbours, at a cost to the effective number density of galaxies $n_\mathrm{eff}$ of 30%. We use the cosmological inference pipeline of DES Y1 to explore the cosmological implications of neighbour bias and show that omitting blending from the calibration simulation for DES Y1 would bias the inferred clustering amplitude $S_8\equiv σ_8 (Ω_\mathrm{m} /0.3)^{0.5}$ by $2 σ$ towards low values. Finally, we use the hoopoe simulations to test the effect of neighbour-induced spatial correlations in the multiplicative bias. We find the impact on the recovered $S_8$ of ignoring such correlations to be subdominant to statistical error at the current level of precision.

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arXiv2017

Cosmology from Cosmic Shear with DES Science Verification Data

We present the first constraints on cosmology from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), using weak lensing measurements from the preliminary Science Verification (SV) data. We use 139 square degrees of SV data, which is less than 3\% of the full DES survey area. Using cosmic shear 2-point measurements over three redshift bins we find $σ_8 (Ω_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.81 \pm 0.06$ (68\% confidence), after marginalising over 7 systematics parameters and 3 other cosmological parameters. We examine the robustness of our results to the choice of data vector and systematics assumed, and find them to be stable. About $20$\% of our error bar comes from marginalising over shear and photometric redshift calibration uncertainties. The current state-of-the-art cosmic shear measurements from CFHTLenS are mildly discrepant with the cosmological constraints from Planck CMB data; our results are consistent with both datasets. Our uncertainties are $\sim$30\% larger than those from CFHTLenS when we carry out a comparable analysis of the two datasets, which we attribute largely to the lower number density of our shear catalogue. We investigate constraints on dark energy and find that, with this small fraction of the full survey, the DES SV constraints make negligible impact on the Planck constraints. The moderate disagreement between the CFHTLenS and Planck values of $σ_8 (Ω_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5}$ is present regardless of the value of $w$.

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arXiv2017

Weak-lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters in Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data

We use weak-lensing shear measurements to determine the mean mass of optically selected galaxy clusters in Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data. In a blinded analysis, we split the sample of more than 8,000 redMaPPer clusters into 15 subsets, spanning ranges in the richness parameter $5 \leq λ\leq 180$ and redshift $0.2 \leq z \leq 0.8$, and fit the averaged mass density contrast profiles with a model that accounts for seven distinct sources of systematic uncertainty: shear measurement and photometric redshift errors; cluster-member contamination; miscentering; deviations from the NFW halo profile; halo triaxiality; and line-of-sight projections. We combine the inferred cluster masses to estimate the joint scaling relation between mass, richness and redshift, $\mathcal{M}(λ,z) \varpropto M_0 λ^{F} (1+z)^{G}$. We find $M_0 \equiv \langle M_{200\mathrm{m}}\,|\,λ=30,z=0.5\rangle=\left[ 2.35 \pm 0.22\ \rm{(stat)} \pm 0.12\ \rm{(sys)} \right] \cdot 10^{14}\ M_\odot$, with $F = 1.12\,\pm\,0.20\ \rm{(stat)}\, \pm\, 0.06\ \rm{(sys)}$ and $G = 0.18\,\pm\, 0.75\ \rm{(stat)}\, \pm\, 0.24\ \rm{(sys)}$. The amplitude of the mass-richness relation is in excellent agreement with the weak-lensing calibration of redMaPPer clusters in SDSS by Simet et al. (2016) and with the Saro et al. (2015) calibration based on abundance matching of SPT-detected clusters. Our results extend the redshift range over which the mass-richness relation of redMaPPer clusters has been calibrated with weak lensing from $z\leq 0.3$ to $z\leq0.8$. Calibration uncertainties of shear measurements and photometric redshift estimates dominate our systematic error budget and require substantial improvements for forthcoming studies.

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arXiv2016

Inference from the small scales of cosmic shear with current and future Dark Energy Survey data

Cosmic shear is sensitive to fluctuations in the cosmological matter density field, including on small physical scales, where matter clustering is affected by baryonic physics in galaxies and galaxy clusters, such as star formation, supernovae feedback and AGN feedback. While muddying any cosmological information that is contained in small scale cosmic shear measurements, this does mean that cosmic shear has the potential to constrain baryonic physics and galaxy formation. We perform an analysis of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification (SV) cosmic shear measurements, now extended to smaller scales, and using the Mead et al. 2015 halo model to account for baryonic feedback. While the SV data has limited statistical power, we demonstrate using a simulated likelihood analysis that the final DES data will have the statistical power to differentiate among baryonic feedback scenarios. We also explore some of the difficulties in interpreting the small scales in cosmic shear measurements, presenting estimates of the size of several other systematic effects that make inference from small scales difficult, including uncertainty in the modelling of intrinsic alignment on nonlinear scales, `lensing bias', and shape measurement selection effects. For the latter two, we make use of novel image simulations. While future cosmic shear datasets have the statistical power to constrain baryonic feedback scenarios, there are several systematic effects that require improved treatments, in order to make robust conclusions about baryonic feedback.

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arXiv2016

Cosmic Shear Measurements with DES Science Verification Data

We present measurements of weak gravitational lensing cosmic shear two-point statistics using Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data. We demonstrate that our results are robust to the choice of shear measurement pipeline, either ngmix or im3shape, and robust to the choice of two-point statistic, including both real and Fourier-space statistics. Our results pass a suite of null tests including tests for B-mode contamination and direct tests for any dependence of the two-point functions on a set of 16 observing conditions and galaxy properties, such as seeing, airmass, galaxy color, galaxy magnitude, etc. We furthermore use a large suite of simulations to compute the covariance matrix of the cosmic shear measurements and assign statistical significance to our null tests. We find that our covariance matrix is consistent with the halo model prediction, indicating that it has the appropriate level of halo sample variance. We compare the same jackknife procedure applied to the data and the simulations in order to search for additional sources of noise not captured by the simulations. We find no statistically significant extra sources of noise in the data. The overall detection significance with tomography for our highest source density catalog is 9.7sigma. Cosmological constraints from the measurements in this work are presented in a companion paper (DES et al. 2015).

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arXiv2016

The DES Science Verification Weak Lensing Shear Catalogues

We present weak lensing shear catalogues for 139 square degrees of data taken during the Science Verification (SV) time for the new Dark Energy Camera (DECam) being used for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We describe our object selection, point spread function estimation and shear measurement procedures using two independent shear pipelines, IM3SHAPE and NGMIX, which produce catalogues of 2.12 million and 3.44 million galaxies respectively. We detail a set of null tests for the shear measurements and find that they pass the requirements for systematic errors at the level necessary for weak lensing science applications using the SV data. We also discuss some of the planned algorithmic improvements that will be necessary to produce sufficiently accurate shear catalogues for the full 5-year DES, which is expected to cover 5000 square degrees.

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arXiv2016

Cosmology constraints from shear peak statistics in Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data

Shear peak statistics has gained a lot of attention recently as a practical alternative to the two point statistics for constraining cosmological parameters. We perform a shear peak statistics analysis of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification (SV) data, using weak gravitational lensing measurements from a 139 deg$^2$ field. We measure the abundance of peaks identified in aperture mass maps, as a function of their signal-to-noise ratio, in the signal-to-noise range $0<\mathcal S / \mathcal N<4$. To predict the peak counts as a function of cosmological parameters we use a suite of $N$-body simulations spanning 158 models with varying $Ω_{\rm m}$ and $σ_8$, fixing $w = -1$, $Ω_{\rm b} = 0.04$, $h = 0.7$ and $n_s=1$, to which we have applied the DES SV mask and redshift distribution. In our fiducial analysis we measure $σ_{8}(Ω_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.6}=0.77 \pm 0.07$, after marginalising over the shear multiplicative bias and the error on the mean redshift of the galaxy sample. We introduce models of intrinsic alignments, blending, and source contamination by cluster members. These models indicate that peaks with $\mathcal S / \mathcal N>4$ would require significant corrections, which is why we do not include them in our analysis. We compare our results to the cosmological constraints from the two point analysis on the SV field and find them to be in good agreement in both the central value and its uncertainty. We discuss prospects for future peak statistics analysis with upcoming DES data.

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arXiv2015

Cross-correlation of gravitational lensing from DES Science Verification data with SPT and Planck lensing

We measure the cross-correlation between weak lensing of galaxy images and of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The effects of gravitational lensing on different sources will be correlated if the lensing is caused by the same mass fluctuations. We use galaxy shape measurements from 139 deg$^{2}$ of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification data and overlapping CMB lensing from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck. The DES source galaxies have a median redshift of $z_{\rm med} {\sim} 0.7$, while the CMB lensing kernel is broad and peaks at $z{\sim}2$. The resulting cross-correlation is maximally sensitive to mass fluctuations at $z{\sim}0.44$. Assuming the Planck 2015 best-fit cosmology, the amplitude of the DES$\times$SPT cross-power is found to be $A = 0.88 \pm 0.30$ and that from DES$\times$Planck to be $A = 0.86 \pm 0.39$, where $A=1$ corresponds to the theoretical prediction. These are consistent with the expected signal and correspond to significances of $2.9 σ$ and $2.2 σ$ respectively. We demonstrate that our results are robust to a number of important systematic effects including the shear measurement method, estimator choice, photometric redshift uncertainty and CMB lensing systematics. Significant intrinsic alignment of galaxy shapes would increase the cross-correlation signal inferred from the data; we calculate a value of $A = 1.08 \pm 0.36$ for DES$\times$SPT when we correct the observations with a simple IA model. With three measurements of this cross-correlation now existing in the literature, there is not yet reliable evidence for any deviation from the expected LCDM level of cross-correlation, given the size of the statistical uncertainties and the significant impact of systematic errors, particularly IAs. We provide forecasts for the expected signal-to-noise of the combination of the five-year DES survey and SPT-3G.

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arXiv2015

Weak lensing by galaxy troughs in DES Science Verification data

We measure the weak lensing shear around galaxy troughs, i.e. the radial alignment of background galaxies relative to underdensities in projections of the foreground galaxy field over a wide range of redshift in Science Verification data from the Dark Energy Survey. Our detection of the shear signal is highly significant (10 to 15$σ$ for the smallest angular scales) for troughs with the redshift range z in [0.2,0.5] of the projected galaxy field and angular diameters of 10 arcmin...1°. These measurements probe the connection between the galaxy, matter density, and convergence fields. By assuming galaxies are biased tracers of the matter density with Poissonian noise, we find agreement of our measurements with predictions in a fiducial Lambda cold dark matter model. The prediction for the lensing signal on large trough scales is virtually independent of the details of the underlying model for the connection of galaxies and matter. Our comparison of the shear around troughs with that around cylinders with large galaxy counts is consistent with a symmetry between galaxy and matter over- and underdensities. In addition, we measure the two-point angular correlation of troughs with galaxies which, in contrast to the lensing signal, is sensitive to galaxy bias on all scales. The lensing signal of troughs and their clustering with galaxies is therefore a promising probe of the statistical properties of matter underdensities and their connection to the galaxy field.

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arXiv2015

Joint Analysis of Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing and Galaxy Clustering: Methodology and Forecasts for DES

The joint analysis of galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering is a promising method for inferring the growth function of large scale structure. This analysis will be carried out on data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), with its measurements of both the distribution of galaxies and the tangential shears of background galaxies induced by these foreground lenses. We develop a practical approach to modeling the assumptions and systematic effects affecting small scale lensing, which provides halo masses, and large scale galaxy clustering. Introducing parameters that characterize the halo occupation distribution (HOD), photometric redshift uncertainties, and shear measurement errors, we study how external priors on different subsets of these parameters affect our growth constraints. Degeneracies within the HOD model, as well as between the HOD and the growth function, are identified as the dominant source of complication, with other systematic effects sub-dominant. The impact of HOD parameters and their degeneracies necessitate the detailed joint modeling of the galaxy sample that we employ. We conclude that DES data will provide powerful constraints on the evolution of structure growth in the universe, conservatively/optimistically constraining the growth function to 7.9\%/4.8\% with its first-year data that covered over 1000 square degrees, and to 3.9\%/2.3\% with its full five-year data that will survey 5000 square degrees, including both statistical and systematic uncertainties.

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arXiv2015

Mapping and simulating systematics due to spatially-varying observing conditions in DES Science Verification data

Spatially-varying depth and characteristics of observing conditions, such as seeing, airmass, or sky background, are major sources of systematic uncertainties in modern galaxy survey analyses, in particular in deep multi-epoch surveys. We present a framework to extract and project these sources of systematics onto the sky, and apply it to the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to map the observing conditions of the Science Verification (SV) data. The resulting distributions and maps of sources of systematics are used in several analyses of DES SV to perform detailed null tests with the data, and also to incorporate systematics in survey simulations. We illustrate the complementarity of these two approaches by comparing the SV data with the BCC-UFig, a synthetic sky catalogue generated by forward-modelling of the DES SV images. We analyse the BCC-UFig simulation to construct galaxy samples mimicking those used in SV galaxy clustering studies. We show that the spatially-varying survey depth imprinted in the observed galaxy densities and the redshift distributions of the SV data are successfully reproduced by the simulation and well-captured by the maps of observing conditions. The combined use of the maps, the SV data and the BCC-UFig simulation allows us to quantify the impact of spatial systematics on $N(z)$, the redshift distributions inferred using photometric redshifts. We conclude that spatial systematics in the SV data are mainly due to seeing fluctuations and are under control in current clustering and weak lensing analyses. The framework presented here is relevant to all multi-epoch surveys, and will be essential for exploiting future surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will require detailed null-tests and realistic end-to-end image simulations to correctly interpret the deep, high-cadence observations of the sky.

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arXiv2011

Constraints on intrinsic alignment contamination of weak lensing surveys using the MegaZ-LRG sample

Correlations between the intrinsic shapes of galaxies and the large-scale galaxy density field provide an important tool to investigate galaxy intrinsic alignments, which constitute a major astrophysical systematic in cosmological weak lensing (cosmic shear) surveys, but also yield insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies. We measure galaxy position-shape correlations in the MegaZ-LRG sample for more than 800,000 luminous red galaxies, making the first such measurement with a photometric redshift sample. In combination with a re-analysis of several spectroscopic SDSS samples, we constrain an intrinsic alignment model for early-type galaxies over long baselines in redshift (z ~ 0.7) and luminosity (4mag). We develop and test the formalism to incorporate photometric redshift scatter in the modelling. For r_p > 6 Mpc/h, the fits to galaxy position-shape correlation functions are consistent with the scaling with r_p and redshift of a revised, nonlinear version of the linear alignment model for all samples. An extra redshift dependence proportional to (1+z)^n is constrained to n=-0.3+/-0.8 (1sigma). To obtain consistent amplitudes for all data, an additional dependence on galaxy luminosity proportional to L^b with b=1.1+0.3-0.2 is required. The normalisation of the intrinsic alignment power spectrum is found to be (0.077 +/- 0.008)/rho_{cr} for galaxies at redshift 0.3 and r band magnitude of -22 (k- and evolution-corrected to z=0). Assuming zero intrinsic alignments for blue galaxies, we assess the bias on cosmological parameters for a tomographic CFHTLS-like lensing survey. Both the resulting mean bias and its uncertainty are smaller than the 1sigma statistical errors when using the constraints from all samples combined. The addition of MegaZ-LRG data reduces the uncertainty in intrinsic alignment bias on cosmological parameters by factors of three to seven. (abridged)

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