How to Break the Mass Sheet Degeneracy with the Lightcurves of Microlensed Type Ia Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper proposes using the temporal microlensing variations of expanding supernova disks to break the mass sheet degeneracy in gravitational lensing, improving the precision of cosmological measurements like H0.

Contribution

It introduces a method to utilize microlensing lightcurve variations of lensed Type Ia supernovae to overcome the mass sheet degeneracy in time delay cosmography.

Findings

Approximately 6 doubly imaged systems per year are suitable for this method.

Around 0.3 quadruply imaged systems per year are suitable for this method.

End-of-survey tests could constrain H0 systematics to about 1.8%.

Abstract

The standardizable nature of gravitationally lensed Type Ia supernovae (glSNe Ia) makes them an attractive target for time delay cosmography, since a source with known luminosity breaks the mass sheet degeneracy. It is known that microlensing by stars in the lensing galaxy can add significant stochastic uncertainty to the unlensed luminosity which is often much larger than the intrinsic scatter of the Ia population. In this work, we show how the temporal microlensing variations as the supernova disc expands can be used to improve the standardization of glSNe Ia. We find that SNe are standardizable if they do not cross caustics as they expand. We estimate that this will be the case for $\approx$6 doubly imaged systems and $\approx$0.3 quadruply imaged systems per year in LSST. At the end of the ten year LSST survey, these systems should enable us to test for systematics in $H_0$ due to the mass sheet degeneracy at the $1.00^{+0.07}_{-0.06}$\% level, or $1.8\pm0.2$\% if we can only extract time delays from the third of systems with counter images brighter than $i=24$ mag.