Information Content in the Galaxy Angular Power Spectrum from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Its Implication on Weak-Lensing Analysis

We analyze the photometric redshift catalog of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 (SDSS DR5) to estimate the Fisher information in the galaxy angular power spectrum with the help of the Rimes-Hamilton technique. It is found that the amount of Fisher information contained in the galaxy angular power spectrum is saturated at lensing multipole scale 300 ⩽ l⩽ 2000 in the redshift range 0.1 ≤ photo- z < 0.5. At l = 2000, the observed information is 2 orders of magnitude lower than the case of Gaussian fluctuations. This supports observationally that the translinear regime of the density power spectrum contains little independent information about the initial cosmological conditions, which is consistent with the numerical trend shown by Rimes-Hamilton. Our results also suggest that the Gaussian-noise description may not be valid in weak-lensing measurements.