English

Dark Energy Survey Supernovae: Simulations and Survey Strategy

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2009-06-17 v1

Abstract

We present simulations for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) using a new code suite (SNANA) that generates realistic supernova light curves accounting for atmospheric seeing conditions and intrinsic supernova luminosity variations using MLCS2k2 or SALT2 models. Errors include stat-noise from photo-statistics and sky noise. We applied SNANA to simulate DES supernova observations and employed an MLCS-based fitter to obtain the distance modulus for each simulated light curve. We harnessed the light curves in order to study selection biases for high-redshift supernovae and to constrain the optimal DES observing strategy using the Dark Energy Task Force figure of merit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0906.2955,
  title  = {Dark Energy Survey Supernovae: Simulations and Survey Strategy},
  author = {J. P. Bernstein and R. Kessler and S. Kuhlmann and H. Spinka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0906.2955},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures, conference proceedings of the 43rd Rencontres de Moriond held March 15-22, 2008, in La Thuile, Aosta Valley, Italy