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Abstract:

The Euclid mission of the European Space Agency seeks to understand the Universe’s expansion history and the nature of dark energy, through measurements of cosmic shear. This requires a very accurate estimate of the true redshift distribution of the galaxies, with the systematic error in the mean redshift satisfying σ⟨z⟩ < 0.002(1 + z) per tomographic bin. Achieving this accuracy relies on reference samples with spectroscopic redshifts, together with a procedure to match them to survey sources for which only photometric redshifts are available. One important source of systematic uncertainty is the mismatch in photometric properties between galaxies in the Euclid survey and the reference objects. We develop a method to degrade the photometry of objects with deep photometry to match the properties of any shallower survey in the multi-band photometric space, preserving all the correlations between the fluxes and their uncertainties. We compare our transfer method with more demanding image-based methods, such as Balrog from the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration. According to our metrics, our method outperforms Balrog. We implement our method in the redshift distribution reconstruction, based on the self-organising map approach, and test it using a realistic sample from the Euclid Flagship Mock Galaxy Simulation. We find that the key ingredient is to ensure that the reference objects are distributed in the colour space the same way as the wide-survey objects, which can be efficiently achieved with our transfer method. In our best implementation, the mean redshift biases are consistently reduced across the tomographic bins, bringing a significant fraction of them within the Euclid accuracy requirements in all tomographic bins. Equally importantly, the tests allow us to pinpoint which step in the calibration pipeline has the strongest impact on achieving the required accuracy. Our approach also reproduces the overall redshift distributions, which are crucial for applications such as angular clustering. The agreement between the reconstructed and true distributions demonstrates both the feasibility and robustness of the approach. This implementation is sufficient for Euclid Data Release 1 and provides a solid foundation for subsequent data releases.

Abstract:

This study explores the impact of observational and modelling systematic effects on cluster number counts and cluster clustering and provides model prescriptions for their joint analysis in the context of the Euclid survey. Using 1000 Euclid -like cluster catalogues, we investigated the effect of systematic uncertainties on cluster summary statistics and their auto- and cross-covariance, and performed a likelihood analysis to evaluate their impact on cosmological constraints, with a focus on the matter density parameter (Ω m ) and on the power spectrum amplitude ( σ 8 ). Combining cluster clustering with number counts significantly improves cosmological constraints, with the figure of merit increasing by over 300% compared to number counts alone. We confirm that the two probes are uncorrelated, and the cosmological constraints derived from their combination are almost insensitive to the cosmology dependence of the covariance. We find that photometric redshift uncertainties broaden cosmological posteriors by 20–30%, while secondary effects such as redshift-space distortions (RSDs) have a smaller impact on the posteriors – 5% for clustering alone, 10% when combining probes – but can significantly bias the constraints if neglected. We show that clustering data below 60 h −1 Mpc provides additional constraining power, while scales larger than the acoustic oscillation scale add almost no information on Ω m and σ 8 parameters. The RSDs and photo- z uncertainties also influence the number count covariance, with a significant impact of about 15–20% on the parameter constraints.

Abstract:

The tomographic approach to analysing the 3 × 2 pt signal involves dividing the observed galaxy sample into a configuration of redshift bins. We present a simulation-based method to explore the optimum tomographic binning strategy for Euclid, focussing on the expected configuration of its first major data release (DR1). To do so, we 1) simulated a Euclid-like observation and generated mock shear catalogues from multiple realisations of the 3 × 2 pt fields on the sky; and 2) measured the 3 × 2 pt Pseudo-Cℓ power spectra for a given tomographic configuration and derived the constraints they place on the standard dark energy equation-of-state parameters, (w0, wa). For a simulation including Gaussian-distributed photometric redshift uncertainties and shape noise under a ΛCDM cosmology, we find that bins that are equipopulated with galaxies yield the best constraints on (w0, wa) for an analysis of the full 3 × 2 pt signal or the angular clustering component only. For the cosmic shear component, the optimum (w0, wa) constraints can be achieved by bins equally spaced in fiducial comoving distance. However, the advantage with respect to alternative binning choices is only of a few per cent in the size of the 1σ (w0, wa) contour and we conclude that the cosmic shear is relatively insensitive to the binning methodology. We find that the information gain extracted on (w0, wa) for any 3 × 2 pt component starts to become saturated beyond roughly seven or eight bins. Any marginal gains resulting from a greater number of bins are likely to be limited by additional uncertainties present in a real measurement and the increasing demand for accuracy of the covariance matrix. Finally, we considered a 5% contamination from catastrophic photometric redshift outliers and found that if these errors are not mitigated in the analysis, the bias induced in the 3 × 2 pt signal for ten equipopulated bins results in dark energy constraints that are inconsistent with the fiducial ΛCDM cosmology at ≳3σ.

Abstract:

We investigate the non-Gaussian features in the distribution of the matter power spectrum multipoles. Using the COVMOS method, we generated 100 000 mock realisations of dark matter density fields in both real and redshift space across multiple redshifts and cosmological models. We derived an analytical framework linking the non-Gaussianity of the power spectrum distribution to higher-order statistics of the density field, including the trispectrum and pentaspectrum. We explored the effect of redshift-space distortions, the geometry of the survey, the Fourier binning, the integral constraint, and the shot noise on the skewness of the distribution of the power spectrum measurements. Our results demonstrate that the likelihood of the estimated matter power spectrum significantly deviates from a Gaussian assumption on non-linear scales, particularly at low redshift. This departure is primarily driven by the pentaspectrum contribution, which dominates over the trispectrum at intermediate scales. We also examined the impact of the finiteness of the survey geometry in the context of the Euclid mission, and we find that both the shape of the survey and the integral constraint amplify the skewness.

Abstract:

The Cosmic Dawn Survey pre-launch catalogues cover an effective 10.13 deg 2 area with uniform deep Spitzer /IRAC data ( m ∼ 25 mag, 5 σ ), the largest area covered to these depths at IR wavelengths. We used these data to gain new insight into the growth of stellar mass across cosmic history by characterising the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function through 0.2 < z ≤ 6.5. The total volume (0.62 Gpc 3 ) represents an order of magnitude increase compared to previous works that explored z > 3 and significantly reduces cosmic variance, thus yielding strong constraints on the abundance of galaxies above the characteristic stellar mass (ℳ ★ ) across this ten billion year period. The evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function is generally consistent with results from the literature but now provides firm estimates of the number density where only upper limits were previously available. Contrasting the galaxy stellar mass function with the dark matter halo mass function suggests that massive galaxies (ℳ ≳ 10 11 M ⊙ ) at z > 3.5 required integrated star-formation efficiencies of ℳ/(ℳ h f b )≳ 0.25–0.5, in excess of the commonly held view of a ‘universal peak efficiency’ from studies on the stellar-to-halo mass relation. Such increased efficiencies imply an evolving peak in the stellar-to-halo mass relation at z > 3.5 that can be maintained if feedback mechanisms from active galactic nuclei and stellar processes are ineffective at early times. In addition, a significant fraction of the most massive quiescent galaxies are observed to be in place by z ∼ 2.5–3. The apparent lack of change in their number density by z ∼ 0.2 is consistent with relatively little mass growth from mergers. Utilising the unique volume, we find evidence of an environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function all the way through z ∼ 3.5 for the first time, though a more careful characterisation of the density field is ultimately required for confirmation.