Speaker: Heather Campbell
Location: NAM, Manchester
Future supernova surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES), will be unable to spectroscopically classify all the Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) that they are predicted to detect (approximately 4000). The development of an efficient and robust photometric classification system is thus essential.

Here I present the analysis of a photometrically-classified sample of SNe Ia from the full Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) II Supernova Survey, supplemented with host galaxy redshifts from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In total, we photometrically-classify 751 SNe Ia out to z < 0.5 with cosmologically-useful light curves, which is ~3 times the size of the comparable spectroscopically confirmed sample from SDSS. Tests with simulations show that our method results in less than 5% contamination, which we show does not bias our cosmological results. Using only photometrically-classified SNe Ia, we produce cosmological constraints comparable to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) 3 year spectroscopically confirmed SNe Ia. This work demonstrates the potential of photometric classification, which will become the primary method of compiling SN Ia samples in high-redshift surveys in the near future.