Statistical separation of weak gravitational lensing and intrinsic ellipticities based on galaxy colour information

Abstract

ABSTRACT Intrinsic alignments of galaxies are recognized as one of the most important systematic in weak lensing surveys on small angular scales. In this paper, we investigate ellipticity correlation functions that are measured separately on elliptical and spiral galaxies, for which we assume the generic alignment mechanisms based on tidal shearing and tidal torquing, respectively. Including morphological information allows to find linear combinations of measured ellipticity correlation functions that suppress the gravitational lensing signal completely or which show a strongly boosted gravitational lensing signal relative to intrinsic alignments. Specifically, we find that (i) intrinsic alignment spectra can be measured in a model-independent way at a significance of Σ ≃ 60 with a wide-angle tomographic survey such as Euclid’s, (ii) the underlying intrinsic alignment model parameters can be determined at per cent-level precision, (iii) this measurement is not impeded by misclassifying galaxies and assuming a wrong alignment model, (iv) parameter estimation from a cleaned weak lensing spectrum is possible with almost no bias, and (v) the misclassification would not strongly impact parameter estimation from the boosted weak lensing spectrum.