About

LSST Corporation Support

We thank the LSST Corporation for their support of this workshop through their Enabling Science program. This partial support provides for the workshop venue, and support for students and postdocs to attend the workshop. 

Introduction

One of the major science goals of the LSST is to elucidate the nature of dark matter and dark energy,  in part through measurements of the weak gravitational lensing of several billion galaxies distributed over the uniquely wide and deep volume that will be surveyed by the LSST. When combined with LSST’s measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillations and Planck CMB data, the result will be an unprecedented probe of the physics of dark energy, and the growth and distribution of dark-matter structure in the universe.

Current weak lensing surveys have developed methods to model and remove systematic biases due to atmospheric, optical, and detector effects. As a result, analysis algorithms have been developed to partially correct for these shear systematics.  LSST is designed to minimize known systematics, and the LSST shear estimation algorithms will benefit from existing efforts. However, after correcting for these effects in the analysis pipeline, LSST may have small but significant residual atmospheric and CCD-detector systematics that affect many areas of LSST science. 

These form a “foreground” of systematic errors that can also be measured and potentially corrected. The purpose of the workshop is to gather together researchers who are actively tackling these individual problems, to leverage the various ideas and techniques, consider helpful ancillary data, and develop a joint method of optimizing the LSST WL probes – on a timescale that would enable incorporation into the LSST data management pipeline and operations planning. This is complementary to other workshops that focus on analysis of compromised data.