Dark energy from large-scale structure lensing information

Wide area large-scale structure (LSS) surveys are planning to map a substantial fraction of the visible Universe to quantify dark energy through baryon acoustic oscillations. At increasing redshift, for example, that probed by proposed 21-cm intensity mapping surveys, gravitational lensing potentially limits the fidelity (Hui et al., 2007) because it distorts the apparent matter distribution. In this paper we show that these distortions can be reconstructed, and actually used to map the distribution of intervening dark matter. The lensing information for sources at z = 1 - 3 allows accurate reconstruction of the gravitational potential on large scales, l less than or similar to 100, which is well matched for integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect measurements of dark energy and its sound speed, and a strong constraint for modified gravity models of dark energy. We built an optimal quadratic lensing estimator for non-Gaussian sources, which is necessary for LSS. The phenomenon of "information saturation'' (Rimes & Hamilton, 2005) saturates reconstruction at mildly nonlinear scales, where the linear source power spectrum Delta(2) similar to 0.2-0.5, depending on power spectrum slope. Naive Gaussian estimators with nonlinear cutoff can be tuned to reproduce the optimal non-Gaussian errors within a factor of 2. We compute the effective number densities of independent lensing sources for LSS lensing, and find that they increase rapidly with redshifts. For LSS/21-cm sources at z similar to 2-4, the lensing reconstruction is limited by cosmic variance at l less than or similar to 100.