Paper detail

A novel method for unbiased measurements of growth with cosmic shear

I present a new technique for the measurement of the growth of cosmic structures via the power spectrum of weak lensing cosmic shear. It is based on a template-fitting approach, where a redshift-dependent amplitude of lensing modulates a fixed template power spectrum. Such an amplitude, which is promoted to a free parameter and fit against tomographic cosmic shear data, reads $D(z)\,σ_8\,Ω_{{\rm m},0}=:Ωσ_8(z)$, with $D(z)$ the growth factor, $σ_8$ a proxy for the overall amplitude of the matter power spectrum, and $Ω_{{\rm m},0}$ the present-day matter abundance. I show that this method is able to correctly reconstruct $Ωσ_8$ at the per cent level across redshift, thus allowing us to measure the growth of structures unbiased by observing discrete tracers. Moreover, I only makes use of measurements on linear scales. The method is highly complementary to measurements of the bias and growth, $bσ_8(z)$ and $fσ_8(z)$, from galaxy clustering analysis. I also demonstrate that the method is robust against an incorrect choice of cosmological parameters in the template, thanks to the inclusion of an Alcock-Paczyński parameter.