Strong Gravitational Lensing and Dark Energy Complementarity

Abstract

In the search for the nature of dark energy most cosmological probes measure simple functions of the expansion rate. While powerful, these all involve roughly the same dependence on the dark energy equation of state parameters, with anticorrelation between its present value w_0 and time variation w_a. Quantities that have instead positive correlation and so a sensitivity direction largely orthogonal to, e.g., distance probes offer the hope of achieving tight constraints through complementarity. Such quantities are found in strong gravitational lensing observations of image separations and time delays. While degeneracy between cosmological parameters prevents full complementarity, strong lensing measurements to 1% accuracy can improve equation of state characterization by 15-50%. Next generation surveys should provide data on roughly 10^5 lens systems, though systematic errors will remain challenging.