Cosmological measurements with forthcoming radio continuum surveys

We present forecasts for constraints on cosmological models that can be obtained using the forthcoming radio continuum surveys: the wide surveys with the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) for radio astronomy, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Westerbork Observations of the Deep Apertif Northern Sky (WODAN). We use simulated catalogues that are appropriate to the planned surveys in order to predict measurements obtained with the source autocorrelation, the cross-correlation between radio sources and cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps (the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect), the cross-correlation of radio sources with foreground objects resulting from cosmic magnification, and a joint analysis together with the CMB power spectrum and supernovae (SNe). We show that near-future radio surveys will bring complementary measurements to other experiments, probing different cosmological volumes and having different systematics. Our results show that the unprecedented sky coverage of these surveys combined should provide the most significant measurement yet of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. In addition, we show that the use of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect will significantly tighten the constraints on modified gravity parameters, while the best measurements of dark energy models will come from galaxy autocorrelation function analyses. Using a combination of the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) and WODAN to provide a full-sky survey, it will be possible to measure the dark energy parameters with an uncertainty of {σ(w 0) = 0.05, σ(w a) = 0.12} and the modified gravity parameters {σ(η 0) = 0.10, σ(μ 0) = 0.05}, assuming Planck CMB+SN (current data) priors. Finally, we show that radio surveys would detect a primordial non-Gaussianity of f NL= 8 at 1σ, and we briefly discuss other promising probes. © 2012 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS.