Foundation Supernova Survey first data release

Here, we present our initial sample of 225 SN Ia grizP1 light curves, of which 180 pass all criteria for inclusion in a cosmological sample. The Foundation Supernova Survey already contains more cosmologically useful SNe Ia than all other published low-redshift SN Ia samples combined. We expect that the systematic uncertainties for the Foundation Supernova Sample will be two to three times smaller than other low-redshift samples.

We find that our cosmologically useful sample has an intrinsic scatter of 0.111mag, smaller than other low-redshift samples. We perform detailed simulations showing that simply replacing the current low-redshift SN Ia sample with an equally sized Foundation sample will improve the precision on the dark energy equation-of-state parameter by 35 per cent, and the dark energy figure of merit by 72 per cent.