Evolution of intrinsic ellipticity correlations due to peculiar motion

Topic of this paper is the time-evolution of intrinsic correlations of galaxy ellipticities due to peculiar motion. In our model, the galaxy ellipticities are determined from the angular momentum of their host haloes, which can be computed from the fluctuations statistics of a Gaussian random field. Subsequent peculiar motion distorts the ellipticity field and causes changes in the ellipticity correlations. Using analogies between this problem of shifted ellipticity tensors and the displacements of polarisation tensors in gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background we compute E-mode and B-mode spectra of the time-evolved ellipticity field, where the displacements are modelled with first and second order Lagrangian perturbation theory. For EUCLID, ellipticity correlations are decreased on large multipoles l >1000, amounting to up to 10% in the E-mode spectrum C_E^epsilon(l) and up to 60% in the B-mode spectrum C_B^epsilon(l) at l~3000 due to the dispersing effect of peculiar motion. E/B-mode conversion in analogy to CMB-lensing is present but small. We conclude that distortions of the ellipticity field due to peculiar motion is not affecting the prediction of ellipticity models on the scales relevant for lensing in the case of EUCLID's galaxy distribution, but should affect larger scales for surveys at lower redshifts.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRA

Angular ellipticity correlations in a composite alignment model for elliptical and spiral galaxies and inference from weak lensing

We investigate a physical, composite alignment model for both spiral and elliptical galaxies and its impact on cosmological parameter estimation from weak lensing for a tomographic survey. Ellipticity correlation functions and angular ellipticity spectra for spiral and elliptical galaxies are derived on the basis of tidal interactions with the cosmic large-scale structure and compared to the tomographic weak lensing signal. We find that elliptical galaxies cause a contribution to the weak-lensing dominated ellipticity correlation on intermediate angular scales between $\ell\simeq40$ and $\ell\simeq400$ before that of spiral galaxies dominates on higher multipoles. The predominant term on intermediate scales is the negative cross-correlation between intrinsic alignments and weak gravitational lensing (GI-alignment). We simulate parameter inference from weak gravitational lensing with intrinsic alignments unaccounted; the bias induced by ignoring intrinsic alignments in a survey like Euclid is shown to be several times larger than the statistical error and can lead to faulty conclusions when comparing to other observations. The biases generally point into different directions in parameter space, such that in some cases one can observe a partial cancellation effect. Furthermore, it is shown that the biases increase with the number of tomographic bins used for the parameter estimation process. We quantify this parameter estimation bias in units of the statistical error and compute the loss of Bayesian evidence for a model due to the presence of systematic errors as well as the Kullback-Leibler divergence to quantify the distance between the true model and the wrongly inferred one