Dark Energy Constraints from Weak Lensing Cross-Correlation Cosmography

Abstract

We present a method to implement the idea of Jain & Taylor to constrain cosmological parameters with weak gravitational lensing. Photometric redshift information on foreground galaxies is used to produce templates of the mass structure at foreground slices z_\ell, and the predicted distortion field is cross-correlated with the measured shapes of sources at redshift z_s. The variation of the cross-correlation with z_s depends purely on ratios of angular diameter distances. We propose a formalism for such an analysis that makes use of all foreground-background redshift pairs, and derive the Fisher uncertainties on the dark energy parameters that would result from such a survey. Surveys from the proposed SNAP satellite or the LSST observatory could constrain the dark energy equation of state to 0.01 f_sky^{-1/2} in w_0 and 0.035 f_sky^{-1/2} in w_a after application of a practical prior on \Omega_m. Advantages of this method over power-spectrum measurements are that it is unaffected by residual PSF distortions, is not limited by sample-variance, and can use non-linear mass structures to constrain cosmology. The signal is, however, very small, amounting to a change of a few parts in 10^3 of the lensing distortion. The calibration of lensing distortion must be independent of redshift to comparable levels, and photometric redshifts must be similarly free of bias. Both of these tasks require substantial advance over the present state of the art, but we discuss how such accurate calibrations might be achieved using internal consistency tests. Elimination of redshift bias would require spectroscopic redshifts of 10^4-10^5 high redshift galaxies.