Gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae in future wide-field optical imaging surveys

TL;DR

Future wide-field optical surveys will significantly increase the detection of gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae, enabling precise cosmological measurements and expanding our understanding of dark energy and the universe's expansion.

Contribution

This paper provides detailed predictions for the yields of lensed quasars and supernovae in upcoming surveys, including their potential for cosmological parameter estimation.

Findings

LSST will find approximately 8000 lensed quasars and 130 lensed supernovae.

About 15% of the lensed quasars and 30% of the supernovae will be quadruply imaged.

The predicted uncertainties for dark energy parameters are comparable to space-based supernova surveys.

Abstract

Cadenced optical imaging surveys in the next decade will be capable of detecting time-varying galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses in large numbers, increasing the size of the statistically well-defined samples of multiply-imaged quasars by two orders of magnitude, and discovering the first strongly-lensed supernovae. We carry out a detailed calculation of the likely yields of several planned surveys, using realistic distributions for the lens and source properties and taking magnification bias and image configuration detectability into account. We find that upcoming wide-field synoptic surveys should detect several thousand lensed quasars. In particular, the LSST should find 8000 lensed quasars, 3000 of which will have well-measured time delays, and also ~130 lensed supernovae, which is compared with ~15 lensed supernovae predicted to be found by the JDEM. We predict the quad fraction to be ~15% for the lensed quasars and ~30% for the lensed supernovae. Generating a mock catalogue of around 1500 well-observed double-image lenses, we compute the available precision on the Hubble constant and the dark energy equation parameters for the time delay distance experiment (assuming priors from Planck): the predicted marginalised 68% confidence intervals are \sigma(w_0)=0.15, \sigma(w_a)=0.41, and \sigma(h)=0.017. While this is encouraging in the sense that these uncertainties are only 50% larger than those predicted for a space-based type-Ia supernova sample, we show how the dark energy figure of merit degrades with decreasing knowledge of the the lens mass distribution. (Abridged)