Utilizing Type Ia Supernovae in a Large, Fast, Imaging Survey to Constrain Dark Energy

Understand

We study the utility of a large sample of type Ia supernovae that might be observed in an imaging survey that rapidly scans a large fraction of the sky for constraining dark energy.

• We consider information from the traditional luminosity distance test as well as the spread in SNeIa fluxes at fixed redshift induced by gravitational lensing.
• We include a treatment of photometric redshift uncertainties in our analysis.
• Our primary result is that the information contained in the mean distance moduli of SNeIa and the dispersion among SNeIa distance moduli complement each other, breaking a degeneracy between the present dark energy equation of state and its time variation without the need for a high-redshift supernova sample.