Analysis of twopoint statistics of cosmic shear II. Optimizing the survey geometry.pdfVIP

Astronomy Astrophysics manuscript no. paperbib February 2, 2008 (DOI: will be inserted by hand later) Analysis of two-point statistics of cosmic shear: II. Optimizing the survey geometry Martin Kilbinger1 and Peter Schneider1,2 1 Institut f. Astrophysik u. Extr. Forschung, Universit¨at Bonn, Auf dem H¨ugel 71, D-53121 Bonn, Germany 4 2 Max-Planck-Institut f. Astrophysik, Postfach 1317, D-85741 Garching, Germany 0 0 2 Received / Accepted n Abstract. We present simulations of a cosmic shear survey and show how the survey geometry influences the a J accuracy of determination of cosmological parameters. We numerically calculate the full covariance matrices Cov of two-point statistics of cosmic shear, based on the expressions derived in the first paper of this series. The 3 individual terms are compared for two survey geometries with large and small cosmic variance. We use analyses 1 based on maximum likelihood of Cov and the Fisher information matrix in order to derive expected constraints 2 on cosmological parameters. As an illustrative example, we simulate various survey geometries consisting of 300 ′ ′ individual fields of 13 ×13 size, placed (semi-)randomly into patches which are assumed to be widely separated on v 2 9 the sky and therefore uncorrelated. Using the aperture mass statistics Map , the optimum survey consists of 10 1 patches with 30 images in