Alex Amon and Naomi Robertson talk about their recent work analysing all of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the Hyper Suprime Cam survey (HSC), and the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In particular they look to see whether the three lensing surveys (DES, HSC and KiDS) are consistent with the clustering of galaxies in BOSS.

Consistency checks are always good just for their own sake, but this has particular relevance in the context of the S₈ tension, as the lensing surveys provide the strongest evidence of this tension.

They find that the lensing surveys are (broadly) consistent with each other and are then also consistent with the clustering in BOSS. When restricting to larger scales, they also don’t find evidence for a different cosmology to Planck. When they include smaller scales there is a strong tension between the lensing/clustering probes and the Planck cosmology (i.e. the S₈ tension).

Takeaways are that the local probes of matter appear to be consistent with each other and the S₈ tension is best probed by smaller scales. Unfortunately this is also where baryonic effects dominate so we need more data constraining them and improved modelling to make further progress.

Alex: https://amonalexandra.com/
Naomi: https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/people/naomi.robertson
The paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07440

(sorry to all about my audio, the computer was using the webcam as a microphone, instead of the microphone)