Constraining Dark Energy From Splitting Angle Statistic of Strong Gravitational Lenses

Abstract

Utilizing the CLASS statistical sample, we investigate the constraint of the splitting angle statistic of strong gravitational lenses(SGL) on the equation-of-state parameter $w=p/\rho$ of the dark energy in the flat cold dark matter cosmology. Through the comoving number density of dark halos described by Press-Schechter theory, dark energy affects the efficiency with which dark-matter concentrations produce strong lensing signals. The constraints on both constant $w$ and time-varying $w(z)=w_0+w_az/(1+z)$ from the SGL splitting angle statistic are consistently obtained by adopting a two model combined mechanism of dark halo density profile matched at the mass scale $M_c$. Our main observations are: (a) the resulting model parameter $M_c$ is found to be $M_c \sim 1.4$ for both constant $w$ and time-varying $w(z)$, which is larger than $M_c \sim 1$ obtained in literatures; (b) the fitting results for the constant $w$ are found to be $w =-0.89^{+0.49}_{-0.26}$ and $w =-0.94^{+0.57}_{-0.16}$ for the source redshift distributions of the Gaussian models $g(z_s)$ and $g^c(z_s)$ respectively, which are consistent with the $\Lambda \rm CDM$ at 95% C.L; (c) the time-varying $w(z)$ is found to be for $\sigma_8 = 0.74$: $(M_c; w_0, w_a)=(1.36; -0.92, -1.31)$ and $(M_c; w_0, w_a)=(1.38; -0.89, -1.21)$ for $g(z_s)$ and $g^c(z_s)$ respectively.