The DESC Photometric Redshifts Working Group: Challenges & Opportunities

LSST will make photometric observations of billions of galaxies down to an unprecedented limiting magnitude, yielding a catalog with the potential to revolutionize our knowledge of the dark universe by multiple cosmological probes. However, only a small subset of the galaxy catalog will have spectroscopic redshift measurements; with photometry alone, the redshift estimates for the vast majority of the sample will be subject to highly non-trivial uncertainties. The Photometric Redshifts (PZ) Working Group will produce well-constrained redshift information that can be propagated through DESC’s multi-probe cosmological analysis pipelines. We present an overview of our recent progress in identifying and addressing the challenges of photometric redshift estimation, as well as the opportunities that have arisen through this work and our plans moving forward.