Probing cosmology with weak lensing selected clusters. II. Dark energy and f(R) gravity models

Abstract

Abstract Ongoing and future wide-field galaxy surveys can be used to locate a number of clusters of galaxies with cosmic shear measurement alone. We study constraints on cosmological models using statistics of weak lensing selected galaxy clusters. We extend our previous theoretical framework to model the statistical properties of clusters in variants of cosmological models as well as in the standard ΛCDM model. Weak lensing selection of clusters does not rely on conventional assumptions such as the relation between luminosity and mass and/or hydrostatic equilibrium, but a number of observational effects compromise robust identification. We use a large set of realistic mock weak lensing catalogs as well as analytic models to perform a Fisher analysis and make a forecast for constraining two competing cosmological models, the wCDM model and f(R) model proposed by Hu and Sawicki (2007, Phys. Rev. D, 76, 064004), with our lensing statistics. We show that weak lensing selected clusters are excellent probes of cosmology when combined with cosmic shear power spectrum even in the presence of galaxy shape noise and masked regions. With the information from weak lensing selected clusters, the precision of cosmological parameter estimates can be improved by a factor of ∼1.6 and ∼8 for the wCDM model and f(R) model, respectively. The Hyper Suprime-Cam survey with sky coverage of 1250 degrees squared can constrain the equation of state of dark energy w0 with a level of Δw0 ∼ 0.1. It can also constrain the additional scalar degree of freedom in the f(R) model with a level of |fR0| ∼ 5 × 10−6, when constraints from cosmic microwave background measurements are incorporated. Future weak lensing surveys with sky coverage of 20000 degrees squared will place tighter constraints on w0 and |fR0| even without cosmic microwave background measurements.