Weak lensing and supernovae: Complementary probes of dark energy

Weak lensing observations and supernova, observations, combined with CMB observations, can both provide powerful constraints on dark energy properties. Considering statistical errors only, we find that luminosity distances inferred from 2000 supernovae and large-scale (l < 1000) angular power spectra inferred from redshift-binned cosmic shear maps place complementary constraints on w(0) and w(a), where w(z) = w(0) + w(a) (a - 1). Further, each set of observations can constrain higher dimensional parameterizations of w(z); we consider eigemnodes of the w(z) error covariance matrix and find that such datasets can each constrain the amplitude of about 5 w(z) eigenmodes. We also consider another parameterization of the dark energy.