COSMOLOGY WITH STRONG-LENSING SYSTEMS

In this paper, we assemble a catalog of 118 strong gravitational lensing systems from the Sloan Lens ACS Survey, BOSS emission-line lens survey, Lens Structure and Dynamics, and Strong Lensing Legacy Survey and use them to constrain the cosmic equation of state. In particular, we consider two cases of dark energy phenomenology: the XCDM model, where dark energy is modeled by a fluid with constant w equation-of-state parameter, and in the Chevalier-Polarski-Linder (CPL) parameterization, where w is allowed to evolve with redshift, w(z) = w(0) +w(1)z/1 + z. We assume spherically symmetric mass distribution in lensing galaxies, but we relax the rigid assumption of the SIS model in favor of a more general power-law index gamma, also allowing it to evolve with redshifts gamma(z). Our results for the XCDM cosmology show agreement with values (concerning both w and gamma parameters) obtained by other authors. We go further and constrain the CPL parameters jointly with gamma(z). The resulting confidence regions for the parameters are much better than those obtained with a similar method in the past. They are also showing a trend of being complementary to the Type Ia supernova data. Our analysis demonstrates that strong gravitational lensing systems can be used to probe cosmological parameters like the cosmic equation of state for dark energy. Moreover, they have a potential to judge whether the cosmic equation of state evolved with time or not.