Clustering redshift distributions for the Dark Energy Survey /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Helsby, Jennifer, author.
Imprint:2015.
Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015
Description:1 electronic resource (99 pages)
Language:English
Format: E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:School code: 0330
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10773243
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:University of Chicago. degree granting institution.
ISBN:9781339079899
Notes:Advisors: Joshua Frieman Committee members: Scott Dodelson; Craig Hogan; Huan Lin; Stephen Meyer.
Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-02(E), Section: B.
English
Summary:Accurate determination of photometric redshifts and their errors is critical for large scale structure and weak lensing studies for constraining cosmology from deep, wide imaging surveys. Current photometric redshift methods suffer from bias and scatter due to incomplete training sets. Exploiting the clustering between a sample of galaxies for which we have spectroscopic redshifts and a sample of galaxies for which the redshifts are unknown can allow us to reconstruct the true redshift distribution of the unknown sample. Here we use this method in both simulations and early data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to determine the true redshift distributions of galaxies in photometric redshift bins. We find that cross-correlating with the spectroscopic samples currently used for training provides a useful test of photometric redshifts and provides reliable estimates of the true redshift distribution in a photometric redshift bin. We discuss the use of the cross-correlation method in validating template- or learning-based approaches to redshift estimation and its future use in Stage IV surveys.