Photometric redshifts: estimating their contamination and distribution using clustering information
2010
We present a new technique to estimate the level of contamination between
photometric redshift
bins. If the true angular
cross-correlationbetween
redshift
binscan be safely assumed to be zero, any measured
cross-correlationis a result of contamination between the
bins. We present the theory for an arbitrary number of
redshift
bins, and discuss in detail the case of two and three
binswhich can be easily solved analytically. We use mock catalogues constructed from the Millennium Simulation to test the method, showing that artificial contamination can be successfully recovered with our method. We find that degeneracies in the parameter space prohibit us from determining a unique solution for the contamination, though constraints are made which can be improved with larger data sets. We then apply the method to an observational galaxy survey: the deep component of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. We estimate the level of contamination between
photometric redshift
binsand demonstrate our ability to reconstruct both the true
redshiftdistribution and the true average
redshiftof galaxies in each photometric
bin.
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Correction
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