Consistent lensing and clustering in a low-S8 Universe with BOSS, DES Year 3, HSC Year 1, and KiDS-1000

ABSTRACT We evaluate the consistency between lensing and clustering based on measurements from Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey combined with galaxy–galaxy lensing from Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3, Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC) Year 1, and Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS)-1000. We find good agreement between these lensing data sets. We model the observations using the Dark Emulator and fit the data at two fixed cosmologies: Planck (S8 = 0.83), and a Lensing cosmology (S8 = 0.76). For a joint analysis limited to large scales, we find that both cosmologies provide an acceptable fit to the data. Full utilization of the higher signal-to-noise small-scale measurements is hindered by uncertainty in the impact of baryon feedback and assembly bias, which we account for with a reasoned theoretical error budget. We incorporate a systematic inconsistency parameter for each redshift bin, A, that decouples the lensing and clustering. With a wide range of scales, we find different results for the consistency between the two cosmologies. Limiting the analysis to the bins for which the impact of the lens sample selection is expected to be minimal, for the Lensing cosmology, the measurements are consistent with A = 1; A = 0.91 ± 0.04 (A = 0.97 ± 0.06) using DES+KiDS (HSC). For the Planck case, we find a discrepancy: A = 0.79 ± 0.03 (A = 0.84 ± 0.05) using DES+KiDS (HSC). We demonstrate that a kinematic Sunyaev–Zeldovich-based estimate for baryonic effects alleviates some of the discrepancy in the Planck cosmology. This analysis demonstrates the statistical power of small-scale measurements; however, caution is still warranted given modelling uncertainties and foreground sample selection effects.