Cosmic complementarity: combining CMB and supernova observations

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that combining future supernova and CMB data significantly improves the precision of measuring cosmological parameters Omega and Lambda, highlighting the complementarity of these observations.

Contribution

It provides a practical method to combine SN Ia and CMB data, showing their joint analysis greatly enhances parameter estimation accuracy.

Findings

Joint analysis reduces error bars by over an order of magnitude.

SN Ia and CMB data are highly complementary.

Derived a simple expression for SN Ia Fisher information matrix.

Abstract

We compute the accuracy with which Omega and Lambda can be measured by combining future SN Ia and CMB experiments, deriving a handy expression for the SN Ia Fisher information matrix. The two data sets are found to be highly complementary: a joint analysis reduces the error bars by more than an order of magnitude compared to a separate analysis of either data set.