Standardizing Type Ia supernovae optical brightness using near-infrared rebrightening time

Accurate standardization of Type Ia supernovae (SNIa) is instrumental to the usage of SNIa as distance indicators. We analyse a homogeneous sample of 22 low-z SNIa, observed by the Carnegie Supernova Project in the optical and near-infrared (NIR). We study the time of the second peak in the J band, t(2), as an alternative standardization parameter of SNIa peak optical brightness, as measured by the standard SALT2 parameter m(B). We use BAHAMAS, a Bayesian hierarchical model for SNIa cosmology, to estimate the residual scatter in the Hubble diagram. We find that in the absence of a colour correction, t(2) is a better standardization parameter compared to stretch: t(2) has a 1 sigma posterior interval for the Hubble residual scatter of sigma(Delta mu) = {0.250, 0.257} mag, compared to sigma(Delta mu) = {0.280, 0.287} mag when stretch (x(1)) alone is used. We demonstrate that when employed together with a colour correction, t(2) and stretch lead to similar residual scatter. Using colour, stretch and t(2) jointly as standardization parameters does not result in any further reduction in scatter, suggesting that t(2) carries redundant information with respect to stretch and colour. With a much larger SNIa NIR sample at higher redshift in the future, t(2) could be a useful quantity to perform robustness checks of the standardization procedure.