Mock galaxy shape catalogues in the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey

Abstract

Abstract We use the full-sky ray-tracing weak lensing simulations to generate 2268 mock catalogues for the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey first-year shear catalogue. Our mock catalogues take into account various effects as in the real data: the survey footprints, inhomogeneous angular distribution of source galaxies, statistical uncertainties in photometric redshift (photo-z) estimate, variations in the lensing weight, and the statistical noise in galaxy shape measurements including both intrinsic shapes and the measurement errors. We then utilize our mock catalogues to evaluate statistical uncertainties expected in measurements of cosmic shear two-point correlations ξ± with tomographic redshift information for the HSC survey. We develop a quasi-analytical formula for the Gaussian sample variance properly taking into account the number of source pairs in the survey footprints. The standard Gaussian formula significantly overestimates or underestimates the mock results by 50 per cent level. We also show that different photo-z catalogues or the six disconnected fields, rather than a consecutive geometry, cause variations in the covariance by ${\sim } 5{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$. The mock catalogues enable us to study the chi-square distribution for ξ±. We find the wider distribution than that naively expected for the distribution with the degrees of freedom of data vector used. Finally, we propose a method to include non-zero multiplicative bias in mock shape catalogue and show that the non-zero multiplicative bias can change the effective shape noise in cosmic shear analyses. Our results suggest an importance of estimating an accurate form of the likelihood function (and therefore the covariance) for robust cosmological parameter inference from the precise measurements.