1111.1969 (J. P. Bernstein et al.)

Supernova Simulations and Strategies For the Dark Energy Survey    [PDF]

J. P. Bernstein, R. Kessler, S. Kuhlmann, R. Biswas, E. Kovacs, G. Aldering, I. Crane, D. A. Finley, J. A. Frieman, T. Hufford, M. J. Jarvis, A. G. Kim, J. Marriner, P. Mukherjee, R. C. Nichol, P. Nugent, D. Parkinson, R. R. R. Reis, M. Sako, H. Spinka, M. Sullivan

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. We forecast 1) that this survey will provide a homogeneous sample of up to 4000 Type Ia supernovae in the redshift range 0.05View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1969