Giving Cosmic Redshift Drift a Whirl

Abstract

Redshift drift provides a direct kinematic measurement of cosmic acceleration but it occurs with a characteristic time scale of a Hubble time. Thus redshift observations with a challenging precision of $10^{-9}$ require a 10 year time span to obtain a signal-to-noise of 1. We discuss theoretical and experimental approaches to address this challenge, potentially requiring less observer time and having greater immunity to common systematics. On the theoretical side we explore allowing the universe, rather than the observer, to provide long time spans; speculative methods include radial baryon acoustic oscillations, cosmic pulsars, and strongly lensed quasars. On the experimental side, we explore beating down the redshift precision using differential interferometric techniques, including externally dispersed interferometers and spatial heterodyne spectroscopy. Low-redshift emission line galaxies are identified as having high cosmology leverage and systematics control, with an 8 hour exposure on a 10-meter telescope (1000 hours of exposure on a 40-meter telescope) potentially capable of measuring the redshift of a galaxy to a precision of $10^{-8}$ (few $\times 10^{-10}$). Low-redshift redshift drift also has very strong complementarity with cosmic microwave background measurements, with the combination achieving a dark energy figure of merit of nearly 300 (1400) for 5% (1%) precision on drift.