KiDS-450: Tomographic cross-correlation of galaxy shear with Planck lensing

Journal article

We present the tomographic cross-correlation between galaxy lensing measured in the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS-450) with overlapping lensing measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as detected by Planck 2015. We compare our joint probe measurement to the theoretical expectation for a flat $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, assuming the best-fitting cosmological parameters from the KiDS-450 cosmic shear and Planck CMB analyses. We find that our results are consistent within $1\sigma$ with the KiDS-450 cosmology, with an amplitude re-scaling parameter $A_{\rm KiDS} = 0.86 \pm 0.19$. Adopting a Planck cosmology, we find our results are consistent within $2\sigma$, with $A_{\it Planck} = 0.68 \pm 0.15$. We show that the agreement is improved in both cases when the contamination to the signal by intrinsic galaxy alignments is accounted for, increasing $A$ by $\sim 0.1$. This is the first tomographic analysis of the galaxy lensing -- CMB lensing cross-correlation signal, and is based on five photometric redshift bins. We use this measurement as an independent validation of the multiplicative shear calibration and of the calibrated source redshift distribution at high redshifts. We find that constraints on these two quantities are strongly correlated when obtained from this technique, which should therefore not be considered as a stand-alone competitive calibration tool.

Authors: Harnois-Déraps, J; Tröster, T; Chisari, NE; Heymans, C; Waerbeke, LV

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Volume: 471
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 1619–1633
• Publication date: 2017-07-01
• Acceptance date: 2017-06-30
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx1675
• EISSN: 1365-2966
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Keywords: large-scale structure of Universe; gravitational lensing: weak; dark matter