Constraining dark energy with clusters: Complementarity with other probes

The Figure of Merit Science Working Group recently forecast the constraints on dark energy that will be achieved prior to the Joint Dark Energy Mission by ground-based experiments that exploit baryon acoustic oscillations, type Ia supernovae, and weak gravitational lensing. We show that cluster counts from ongoing and near-future surveys should provide robust, complementary dark energy constraints. In particular, we find that optimally combined optical and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect cluster surveys should improve the Dark Energy Task Force figure of merit for pre-Joint Dark Energy Mission projects by a factor of 2 even without prior knowledge of the nuisance parameters in the cluster mass-observable relation. Comparable improvements are achieved in the forecast precision of parameters specifying the principal component description of the dark energy equation of state parameter, as well as in the growth index gamma. These results indicate that cluster counts can play an important complementary role in constraining dark energy and modified gravity even if the associated systematic errors are not strongly controlled.