Power Spectrum Tomography with Weak Lensing

Abstract

Upcoming weak lensing surveys on wide fields will provide the opportunity to reconstruct the structure along the line of sight tomographically by employing photometric redshift information about the source distribution. We define power spectrum statistics (including cross-correlation between redshift bins), quantify the improvement that redshift information can make in cosmological parameter estimation, and discuss ways to optimize the redshift binning. We find that within the adiabatic cold dark matter class of models, crude tomography using two or three redshift bins is sufficient to extract most of the information and improve, by up to an order of magnitude, the measurements of cosmological parameters that determine the growth rate of structure.