Reconstructing the matter power spectrum with future cosmic shear surveys

Abstract

Analyses of cosmic shear typically condense weak lensing information over a range of scales to a single cosmological parameter, S8. This paper presents a method to extract more information from Stage IV cosmic shear measurements by directly reconstructing the matter power spectrum from linear to non-linear scales. We demonstrate that cosmic shear surveys will be sensitive to the shape of the matter power spectrum on non-linear scales. We show that it should be possible to distinguish between different models of baryonic feedback and we investigate the impact of intrinsic alignments and observational systematics on forecasted constraints. In addition to providing important information on galaxy formation, power spectrum reconstruction should provide a definitive answer to the question of whether weak lensing measurements of S8 on linear scales are consistent with the Planck Lambda cold dark matter cosmology. In addition, power spectrum reconstruction may lead to new discoveries on the composition of the dark sector.