Supernova Simulations and Strategies For the Dark Energy Survey

Understand

We present an analysis of supernova light curves simulated for the upcoming Dark Energy Survey (DES) supernova search.

• The simulations employ a code suite that generates and fits realistic light curves in order to obtain distance modulus/redshift pairs that are passed to a cosmology fitter.
• We investigated several different survey strategies including field selection, supernova selection biases, and photometric redshift measurements.
• Using the results of this study, we chose a 30 square degree search area in the griz filter set.