Strong lensing has developed into an important astrophysical tool for probing
both cosmology and galaxies (their structures, formations, and evolutions). Now
several hundreds of strong lens systems produced by massive galaxies have been
discovered, which may form well-defined samples useful for statistical
analyses. To collect a relatively complete lens redshift data from various
large systematic surveys of gravitationally lensed quasars and check the
possibility to use it as a future complementarity to other cosmological probes.
We use the distribution of gravitationally-lensed image separations observed in
the Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey (CLASS), the PMN-NVSS Extragalactic Lens Survey
(PANELS), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and other surveys, considering a
singular isothermal ellipsoid (SIE) model for galactic potentials as well as
improved new measurements of the velocity dispersion function of galaxies based
on the SDSS DR5 data and recent semi-analytical modeling of galaxy formation,
to constrain two dark energy models (ΛCDM and constant w) under a
flat universe assumption. We find that the current lens redshift data give a
relatively weak constraint on the model parameters. However, by combing the
redshift data with the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak and the comic
macrowave background data, we obtain more stringent results, which show that
the flat Λ CDM model is still included at 1σ.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, A&A accepte