We investigate how strong lensing of dusty, star-forming galaxies by foreground galaxies can be used as a probe of dark matter halo substructure. We find that spatially resolved spectroscopy of lensed sources allows dramatic improvements to measureme
nts of lens parameters. In particular we find that modeling of the full, three-dimensional (angular position and radial velocity) data can significantly facilitate substructure detection, increasing the sensitivity of observables to lower mass subhalos. We carry out simulations of lensed dusty sources observed by early ALMA (Cycle 1) and use a Fisher matrix analysis to study the parameter degeneracies and mass detection limits of this method. We find that, even with conservative assumptions, it is possible to detect galactic dark matter subhalos of ~ 10^8 M_{odot} with high significance in most lensed DSFGs. Specifically, we find that in typical DSFG lenses, there is a ~ 55 % probability of detecting a substructure with M>10^8 M_{odot} with more than 5 sigma detection significance in each lens, if the abundance of substructure is consistent with previous lensing results. The full ALMA array, with its significantly enhanced sensitivity and resolution, should improve these estimates considerably. Given the sample of ~100 lenses provided by surveys like the South Pole Telescope, our understanding of dark matter substructure in typical galaxy halos is poised to improve dramatically over the next few years.
We investigate the effect of supersonic relative velocities between baryons and dark matter, recently shown to arise generically at high redshift, on baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements at low redshift. The amplitude of the relative velo
city effect at low redshift is model-dependent, but can be parameterized by using an unknown bias. We find that if unaccounted, the relative velocity effect can shift the BAO peak position and bias estimates of the dark energy equation-of-state due to its non-smooth, out-of-phase oscillation structure around the BAO scale. Fortunately, the relative velocity effect can be easily modeled in constraining cosmological parameters without substantially inflating the error budget. We also demonstrate that the presence of the relative velocity effect gives rise to a unique signature in the galaxy bispectrum, which can be utilized to isolate this effect. Future dark energy surveys can accurately measure the relative velocity effect and subtract it from the power spectrum analysis to constrain dark energy models with high precision.
