Unveiling the Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies with Self-Calibration and DECaLS DR3 data

Abstract

Galaxy intrinsic alignment (IA) is both a source of systematic contamination to cosmic shear measurement and its cosmological applications, and a source of valuable information on the large scale structure of the universe and galaxy formation. The self-calibration (SC) method \citep{SC2008} was designed to separate IA from cosmic shear, free of IA modeling. It was first successfully applied to the KiDS450 and KV450 data \citep{Yao2019}. We apply the SC method to the DECaLS DR3 shear + photo-z catalog and significantly improve the IA detection to $\sim 14\sigma$. We find a strong dependence of IA on galaxy color, with strong IA signal ($\sim 17.6\sigma$) for red galaxies, while the IA signal for blue galaxies is consistent with zero. The detected IA for red galaxies are in reasonable agreement with the non-linear tidal alignment model and the inferred IA amplitude increases with redshift. We address the systematics in the SC method carefully and performed several sanity checks. We discuss various caveats and possible improvements in the measurement, theory and parameter fitting that will be addressed in future works.

arXiv commentmatch version accepted by ApJ

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