Supernova and baryon acoustic oscillation constraints on (new) polynomial dark energy parametrizations: current results and forecasts

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2012-05, Vol.422 (1), p.776-793
• Main Authors: Sendra, Irene, Lazkoz, Ruth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustics; cosmological parameters; cosmology: observations; Dark energy; Oscillators; Parameter estimation; Supernovae; Weather forecasting
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.20661.x

In this work we introduce two new polynomial parametrizations of dark energy and explore their correlation properties. The parameters to fit are the equation-of-state values at z= 0 and z= 0.5, which have naturally low correlation and have already been shown to improve the popular Chevallier-Polarski-Linder (CPL) parametrization. We test our models with low-redshift astronomical probes: type Ia supernovae and baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), in the form of both current and synthetic data. Specifically, we present simulations of measurements of the radial and transversal BAO scales similar to those expected in a BAO high-precision spectroscopic redshift survey such as EUCLID. According to the Bayesian deviance information criterion (DIC), which penalizes large errors and correlations, we show that our models perform better than the CPL reparametrization proposed by Wang (in terms of z= 0 and z= 0.5). This is due to the combination of lower correlation and smaller relative errors. The same holds for a frequentist perspective: the figure-of-merit is larger for our parametrizations.