How Sensitive Are Weak Lensing Statistics to Dark Energy Content?

Future weak lensing surveys will directly probe the clustering of darkmatter, in addition to providing a test for various cosmological models. Recentstudies have provided us with the tools which can be used to construct thecomplete probability distribution function for convergence fields. It is alsopossible to construct the bias associated with the hot-spots in convergencemaps. These techniques can be used in both the quasi-linear and the highlynonlinear regimes using various well developed numerical methods. We use theseresults here to study the weak lensing statistics of cosmological models withdark energy. We study how well various classes of dark energy models can bedistinguished from models with a cosmological constant. We find that the ratioof the square root of the variance of convergence is complementary to theconvergence skewness $S_3$ in probing dark energy equation of state; it can beused to predict the expected difference in weak lensing statistics betweenvarious dark energy models, and for choosing optimized smoothing angles toconstrain a given class of dark energy models. Our results should be useful forprobing dark energy using future weak lensing data with high statistics fromgalaxy weak lensing surveys and supernova pencil beam surveys.Comment: slightly modified version, ApJ accepte