Systematic errors in future weak-lensing surveys: requirements and prospects for self-calibration

We study the impact of systematic errors on planned weak-lensing surveys and compute the requirements on their contributions so that they are not a dominant source of the cosmological parameter error budget. The generic types of error we consider are multiplicative and additive errors in measurements of shear, as well as photometric redshift errors. In general, more powerful surveys have stronger systematic requirements. For example, for a SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP)-type survey the multiplicative error in shear needs to be smaller than 1 per cent of the mean shear in any given redshift bin, while the centroids of photometric redshift bins need to be known to be better than 0.003. With about a factor of 2 degradation in cosmological parameter errors, future surveys can enter a self-calibration regime, where the mean systematic biases are self-consistently determined from the survey and only higher order moments of the systematics contribute. Interestingly, once the power-spectrum measurements are combined with the bispectrum, the self-calibration regime in the variation of the equation of state of dark energy wa is attained with only a 20–30 per cent error degradation.