Tomography of lensing cross power spectra

Abstract

By obtaining photometric redshift information, tomography allows us to cross-correlate galaxy ellipticities in different source redshift bins. The cross-correlation is non-vanishing because the different bins share much of the foreground mass distribution from which, over Gpc scales, the lensing signal is built. If the redshift bins are thick enough however, the cross-correlations are insensitive to contamination from the intrinsic alignments of galaxies since these fall off rapidly on scales larger than a few tens of Mpc. We forecast how lensing tomography using only the cross-power spectra can constrain cosmological parameters compared to tomography including the auto-spectra. It is shown that the parameter errors are degraded by only O(10%) for 5 or more source redshift bins. Thus, the cross-power spectrum tomography can be a simple, model-independent means of reducing the intrinsic alignment contamination while retaining most of the constraints on cosmology.