Super Luminous Supernovae as standardizable candles and high redshift
  distance probes
  We investigate the use of type Ic Super Luminous Supernovae as standardizable
candles and distance indicators. Their appeal as cosmological probes stems from
their remarkable peak luminosities, hot blackbody temperatures and bright
restframe ultraviolet emission. We present a sample of sixteen published SLSN,
from redshifts 0.1 to 1.2 and calculate accurate K-corrections to determine
uniform magnitudes in two synthetic rest-frame filters with central wavelengths
at 400nm and 520nm. At 400nm, we find a low scatter in their uncorrected, raw
mean magnitudes with M(400)=-21.70 for the full sample of sixteen objects. We
investigate the correlation between their decline rates and peak magnitude and
find that the brighter events appear to decline more slowly. We define a
$\Delta M(30)$ decay relation. This correlates peak magnitude and decline over
30 days and can reduce the scatter to 0.25. We further show that M(400) appears
to have a strong colour dependence. Using this colour rate decay relation, a
low scatter of between 0.19 and 0.26 can be found depending on sample
selection. However we caution that only eight to ten objects currently have
enough data to test this colour rate decline relation. We conclude that SLSN Ic
are promising distance indicators at high redshift in regimes beyond those
possible with SNe Ia. Although the empirical relationships are encouraging, the
unknown progenitor systems and how they may evolve with redshift are of some
concern. The two major measurement uncertainties are the limited numbers of low
redshift objects to test these relationships and internal dust extinction in
the host galaxies.
