Supernovae, the lensed cosmic microwave background, and dark energy

Supernova distance and primary cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements provide us with powerful probes of the dark energy evolution in a flat universe, but they degrade substantially once curvature is marginalized. We show that lensed CMB polarization power spectrum measurements, accessible to next generation ground-based surveys such as SPTpol or QUIET, can remove the curvature degeneracy at a level sufficient for the SNAP and Planck surveys and allow a measurement sigma(w(p)) = 0.03, sigma(w(a)) = 0.3 jointly with sigma(Omega(K)) = 0.0035 This expectation assumes that the sum of neutrino masses is independently known to better than 0.1 eV. This assumption is valid if the lightest neutrino has negligible mass in a normal neutrino mass hierarchy and is potentially testable with upcoming direct laboratory measurements.