GalSim-developers/GalSim — pull request #415 by rmjarvis (2013-05-10 21:13:12+00:00)
Title: #377 Add options to use a larger range of k values when building grid for PowerSpectrum

This is a pretty easy PR. I just added two parameters to the PowerSpectrum buildGrid function called `kmin_factor` and `kmax_factor` (both default = 1). They specify that the grid in fourier space should extend to lower or higher (respectively) k values than the defaults you get from `ngrid` and `grid_spacing`.

These are really just for convenience, since it's not too hard to give different values of ngrid and grid_spacing and then take a subset of them. They just handle the scalings appropriately for you.

The motivation for this feature is that when you measure shear correlations, we were finding that the shears generated by PowerSpectrum were losing correlation power, especially at larger separations. The problem was that the power in k-space was clipped abruptly at kmin, whereas the correlations are affected by k values below this. In other words, the shear values were being generated from a band-pass filtered version of the provided power spectrum, rather than the full function.

So if people care about this effect, these new parameters make it easy for them to have the shears include power at smaller or larger k values. We might want this for the Great3 variable shear branches.