2005/07/31 by Fergus Simpson · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/507485
published as Astrophys.J.647:L91-L94,2006 · 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PRL
arxiv created 2005/10/13 · openalex publication_date 2006/08/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
A cosmic shear survey, spanning a significant proportion of the sky, should greatly improve constraints on a number of cosmological parameters. It also provides a unique opportunity to examine the matter power spectrum directly. However, the observed lensing signal corresponds to a weighted average of the power spectrum across a range of scales, and so the potential to resolve the baryon oscillations has been somewhat neglected. These features originated prior to recombination, induced by the acoustics of the photon-baryon fluid. Recent galaxy surveys have detected the imprints (Eisenstein et al.; Cole et al.), and in the future such measurements may even be used to refine our understanding of dark energy. Without redshift information, cosmic shear is an ineffective probe of the baryon oscillations. However, by implementing a multipole-dependent selection of photometric redshift bins, sensitivity is improved by an order of magnitude, bringing the "wiggles" within reach of future surveys. As an illustration, we show that data from surveys scheduled within the next 10 years may begin to distinguish a smoothed power spectrum at the 2 σ level.