DIAGNOSING MULTIPLICATIVE ERROR WITH LENSING MAGNIFICATION OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE

Weak lensing causes spatially coherent fluctuations in the flux of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). This lensing magnification allows for weak lensing measurement independent of cosmic shear. It is free of the shape measurement errors associated with cosmic shear and can therefore be used to diagnose and calibrate multiplicative error. Although this lensing magnification is difficult to accurately. measure in auto correlation, its cross correlation with cosmic shear and galaxy distribution in an overlapping area can be measured to a significantly higher accuracy. Therefore, these cross correlations can put useful constraints on multiplicative error, and the obtained constraint is free of cosmic variance in the weak lensing field. We present two methods implementing this idea and estimate their performances. We find that, with similar to 1 million SNe Ia that can be achieved with the proposed D2k survey with the LSST telescope, a multiplicative error of similar to 0.5% for source galaxies at z(s) similar to 1 can be detected and a larger multiplicative error can be corrected to the level of 0.5%. It is therefore a promising approach to control the multiplicative error to the sub-percent level required for stage IV projects. The combination of the two methods even has the potential to diagnose and calibrate galaxy intrinsic alignment, which is another major systematic error in cosmic shear cosmology.