SUNGLASS: A new weak lensing simulation pipeline
  A new cosmic shear analysis pipeline SUNGLASS (Simulated UNiverses for
Gravitational Lensing Analysis and Shear Surveys) is introduced. SUNGLASS is a
pipeline that rapidly generates simulated universes for weak lensing and cosmic
shear analysis. The pipeline forms suites of cosmological N-body simulations
and performs tomographic cosmic shear analysis using line-of-sight integration
through these simulations while saving the particle lightcone information.
Galaxy shear and convergence catalogues with realistic 3D galaxy redshift
distributions are produced for the purposes of testing weak lensing analysis
techniques and generating covariance matrices for data analysis and
cosmological parameter estimation. We present a suite of fast medium resolution
simulations with shear and convergence maps for a generic 100 square degree
survey out to a redshift of z = 1.5, with angular power spectra agreeing with
the theory to better than a few percent accuracy up to l = 10^3 for all source
redshifts up to z = 1.5 and wavenumbers up to l = 2000 for the source redshifts
z > 1.1. At higher wavenumbers, there is a failure of the theoretical lensing
power spectrum reflecting the known discrepancy of the Smith et al. (2003)
fitting formula at high physical wavenumbers. A two-parameter Gaussian
likelihood analysis of sigma_8 and Omega_m is also performed on the suite of
simulations, demonstrating that the cosmological parameters are recovered from
the simulations and the covariance matrices are stable for data analysis. We
find no significant bias in the parameter estimation at the level of ~ 0.02.
The SUNGLASS pipeline should be an invaluable tool in weak lensing analysis.
