The detectability of baryonic acoustic oscillations in future galaxy surveys.

By R. Angulo, C. Baugh, Carlos S. Frenk, C. Icc, Durham. 2007

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We assess the detectability of baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) in the power spectrum of galaxies using ultralarge volume N-body simulations of the hierarchical clustering of dark matter and semi-analytical modelling of galaxy formation. A step-by-step illustration is given of the various effects (non-linear fluctuation growth, peculiar motions, non-linear and scale-dependent bias) which systematically change the form of the galaxy power spectrum on large scales from the simple prediction of linear perturbation theory. Using a new method to extract the scale of the oscillations, we nevertheless find that the BAO approach gives an unbiased estimate of the sound horizon scale. Sampling variance remains the dominant source of error despite the huge volume of our simulation box (=2.41 h -3 Gpc 3 ). We use our results to forecast the accuracy with which forthcoming surveys will be able to measure the sound horizon scale, s, and, hence constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter, w (with simplifying assumptions and without marginalizing over the other cosmological parameters). Pan-STARRS could potentially yield a measurement with an accuracy of Δs/s = 0.5-0.7 per cent (corresponding to Aw ≈ 2-3 per cent), which is competitive with the proposed WFMOS survey (Δs/s = 1 per cent Aw ≈ 4 per cent). Achieving Δw ≤ 1 per cent using BAO alone is beyond any currently commissioned project and will require an all-sky spectroscopic survey, such as would be undertaken by the SPACE mission concept under proposal to ESA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4be9606d2e5f0f88ce169965d7cc88d22b212181

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmological non-linearities as an effective fluid (2010, result): “a shift in the BAO scale of one percent generates systematics in the deduced dark energy equation of state parameter wde of about five percent [65], which is not negligible compared to the expected statistical errors in the next generation of galaxy surveys.”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, background): “Numerical simulations have shown that linear perturbation applies only on extremely large scales (> 50 Mpc/h) [183, 195, 196].”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “We should worry that these effects might modify the location of the BAO feature relative to the prediction of linear theory, thus distorting our standard ruler (Meiksin et al., 1999; Seo and Eisenstein, 2005; Angulo et al., 2005; Springel et al., 2005; Jeong and Komatsu, 2006; Huff et al., 2007; Ang”