Self-calibration of gravitational shear-galaxy intrinsic ellipticity correlation in weak lensing surveys

Abstract

The galaxy intrinsic alignment is a severe challenge to precision cosmic shear measurement. We propose selfcalibrating the induced gravitational shear-galaxy intrinsic ellipticity correlation (the GI correlation) in weak lensing surveys with photometric redshift measurements. (1) We propose a method to extract the intrinsic ellipticity-galaxy density cross-correlation (I-g) from the galaxy ellipticity-density measurement in the same redshift bin. (2) We also find a generic scaling relation to convert the extracted I-g correlation to the necessary GI correlation. We perform a concept study under simplified conditions and demonstrate its capability to significantly reduce GI contamination. We discuss the impact of various complexities on the two key ingredients of the self-calibration technique, namely the method for extracting the I-g correlation and the scaling relation between the I-g and the GI correlation. We expect that none of them will likely be able to completely invalidate the proposed self-calibration technique. © 2010. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.