Forecasting cosmological constraints from the weak lensing magnification of type Ia supernovae measured by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Abstract

The weak lensing magnification of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is sensitive to the clustering of matter and provides an independent cosmological probe complementary to SN Ia distance measurements. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is uniquely sensitive to this measurement as it can discover high redshift SNe Ia and measure them with high precision. We present a methodology for reconstructing the probability distribution of the weak lensing magnification μ of SNe Ia, p(μ), from observational data, and using it to constrain cosmological parameters. We find that the reconstructed p(μ) can be fitted accurately by a stretched Gaussian distribution and used to measure the variance of μ, ξ_μ, which can be compared to theoretical predictions in a likelihood analysis. Applying our methodology to a set of realistically simulated SNe Ia expected from the Roman Space Telescope, we find that using the weak lensing magnification of the SNe Ia constrains a combination of matter density Ω_m and matter clustering amplitude σ₈. SN Ia distances alone lead to a better than 1% measurement of Ω_m. The combination of SN Ia weak lensing magnification and distance measurements result in a ∼10% measurement on σ₈. The SNe Ia from Roman will be powerful in constraining the cosmological model.

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