The PAU Survey: Intrinsic alignments and clustering of narrow-band photometric galaxies

Abstract

We present the first measurements of the projected clustering and intrinsic alignments (IA) of galaxies observed by the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS). With photometry in 40 narrow optical passbands ($450\mathrm{nm}-850\mathrm{nm}$), the quality of photometric redshift estimation is ${\sigma }_z\sim 0.01(1+z)$ for galaxies in the $19{\mathrm{deg}}^2$ Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) W3 field, allowing us to measure the projected 3D clustering and IA for flux-limited, faint galaxies ($i<22.5$) out to $z\sim 0.8$. To measure two-point statistics, we developed, and tested with mock photometric redshift samples, `cloned' random galaxy catalogues which can reproduce data selection functions in 3D and account for photometric redshift errors. In our fiducial colour-split analysis, we made robust null detections of IA for blue galaxies and tentative detections of radial alignments for red galaxies ($\sim 1-3\sigma$), over scales of $0.1-18h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. The galaxy clustering correlation functions in the PAUS samples are comparable to their counterparts in a spectroscopic population from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly survey, modulo the impact of photometric redshift uncertainty which tends to flatten the blue galaxy correlation function, whilst steepening that of red galaxies. We investigate the sensitivity of our correlation function measurements to choices in the random catalogue creation and the galaxy pair-binning along the line of sight, in preparation for an optimised analysis over the full PAUS area.

18 pages (7 appendix pages), 14 figures (6 appendix figures), accepted in A&A

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• KiDS-1000: Combined halo-model cosmology constraints from galaxy abundance, galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing
• Modeling Intrinsic Galaxy Alignment in the MICE Simulation
• The PAU Survey: Measurement of Narrow-band galaxy properties with Approximate Bayesian Computation
• The PAU Survey: narrowband photometric redshifts using Gaussian processes
• First Evidence of Intrinsic Alignments of Red Galaxies at $z>1$: Cross-correlation between CFHTLenS and FastSound Samples
• The PAU Survey: Measurements of the 4000 Å spectral break with narrow-band photometry
• Intrinsic galaxy alignments in the KiDS-1000 bright sample: dependence on colour, luminosity, morphology, and galaxy scale
• The PAU Survey: Photometric redshift estimation in deep wide fields
• The PAU Survey: Narrow-band image photometry
• Third-order intrinsic alignment of SDSS BOSS LOWZ galaxies
• The PAU Survey: Close galaxy pairs identification and analysis
• A rising tide: Intrinsic alignments since the turn of the millennium
• The PAU Survey: Classifying low-z SEDs using Machine Learning clustering
• Toward accurate measurement of property-dependent galaxy clustering: II. Tests of the smoothed density-corrected $V_{\max }$ method