1:30–2:30 pm ERC 445
“Probing LSS with Large Galaxy Surveys: Systematics and Estimators”
Studying cosmology with large galaxy surveys requires an unprecedented understanding and mitigation of systematics -- a challenge that can be addressed on two fronts: quantification of the impacts of systematics, and new tools to mitigate them. Addressing the first, I will discuss work on the artifacts induced by the observing strategy for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and present large dithers as an effective mechanism to mitigate the induced artifacts (Awan et al. 2016, ApJ, 829, 50) -- a result that has now been adopted for the LSST observing strategy. I will also quantify the impacts of Milky Way dust on Large-Scale Structure (LSS) studies and the resulting cosmological parameter estimation. As for new tools, I will present a galaxy angular correlation function estimator that corrects for sample contamination arising from photometric-redshift estimation (Awan & Gawiser, 2019, submitted to ApJ); our framework allows for optimization of the estimator to improve the precision of cosmological parameter estimation. While these techniques are motivated by preparations for LSST, they are applicable to DES, DESI, HETDEX, Euclid, and WFIRST.