How Sensitive Are Weak Lensing Statistics to Dark Energy Content?
Future weak lensing surveys will directly probe the clustering of dark matter, in addition to providing a test for various cosmological models. Recent studies have provided us with the tools that can be used to construct the complete probability distribution function for convergence fields. It is also possible to construct the bias associated with the hot spots in convergence maps. These techniques can be used in both the quasi-linear and the highly nonlinear regimes using various well-developed numerical methods. We use the results here to study the weak lensing statistics of cosmological models with dark energy. We study how well various classes of dark energy models can be distinguished from models with a cosmological constant. We find that the ratio of the square root of the variance of convergence is complementary to the convergence skewness S3 in probing the dark energy equation of state; it can be used to predict the expected difference in weak lensing statistics between various
