Photometric redshifts for Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Data Release 1
Abstract Photometric redshifts are a key component of many science objectives in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP). In this paper, we describe and compare the codes used to compute photometric redshifts for HSC-SSP, how we calibrate them, and the typical accuracy we achieve with the HSC five-band photometry (grizy). We introduce a new point estimator based on an improved loss function and demonstrate that it works better than other commonly used estimators. We find that our photo-z’s are most accurate at 0.2 ≲ zphot ≲ 1.5, where we can straddle the 4000 Å break. We achieve σ[Δzphot/(1 + zphot)] ∼ 0.05 and an outlier rate of about 15% for galaxies down to i = 25 within this redshift range. If we limit ourselves to a brighter sample of i < 24, we achieve σ ∼ 0.04 and ∼8% outliers. Our photo-z's should thus enable many science cases for HSC-SSP. We also characterize the accuracy of our redshift probability distribution function (PDF) and discover that some codes over-/underestimate the redshift uncertainties, which has implications for N(z) reconstruction. Our photo-z products for the entire area in Public Data Release 1 are publicly available, and both our catalog products (such as point estimates) and full PDFs can be retrieved from the data release site, 〈https://hsc-release.mtk.nao.ac.jp/〉.