Ulrich Feindt, Marek Kowalski, Kerstin Paech
As an increasing number of well measured type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) become
available, the statistical uncertainty on w has been reduced to the same size
as the systematic uncertainty. The statistical error will decrease further in
the near future, and hence the improvement of systematic uncertainties needs to
be addressed, if further progress is to be made. We study how uncertainties in
the primary reference spectrum - which are a main contribution to the
systematic uncertainty budget - affect the measurement of the Dark Energy
equation of state parameter w from SNe Ia. The increasing number of SN
observations can be used to reduce the uncertainties by including perturbations
of the reference spectrum as nuisance parameters in a cosmology fit, thus
"self-calibrating" the Hubble diagram.
We employ this method to real SNe data for the first time and find the
perturbations of the reference spectrum consistent with zero at the 1%-level.
For future surveys we estimate that ~3500 SNe will be required for our method
to outperform the standard method of deriving the cosmological parameters.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0765
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