Self Calibration of Intrinsic Alignments of Galaxies: Validation with Simulations

Intrinsic alignments of galaxies pose a significant challenge to weak gravitational lensing investigations, as they can contaminate the shear-shear correlation function, which serves as a crucial probe of dark matter. In this study, we present a comprehensive examination of intrinsic alignments within the Buzzard suite of dark matter-only simulations. We begin by outlining our efforts to incorporate realistic intrinsic alignments into the simulation at both the mass sheets and catalog levels. Subsequently, we measure the two-point correlation functions associated with intrinsic alignments and quantify their potential contamination of the also measured cosmic shear signal. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these measurements can be utilized to validate a self-calibration algorithm specifically designed to extract the intrinsic alignments signal from real data.