A 2 per cent distance to $z$=0.35 by reconstructing baryon acoustic oscillations - I. Methods and application to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By Nikhil Padmanabhan, Xiaoying Xu, Daniel J. Eisenstein, R. Scalzo, A. Cuesta, K. Mehta, E. Kazin. 2012

575 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first application to density field reconstruction to a galaxy survey to undo the smoothing of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature due to non-linear gravitational evolution and thereby improve the precision of the distance measurements possible. We apply the reconstruction technique to the clustering of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) luminous red galaxy (LRG) sample, sharpening the BAO feature and achieving a 1.9 per cent measurement of the distance to z = 0.35. We update the reconstruction algorithm of Eisenstein et al. to account for the effects of survey geometry as well as redshift-space distortions and validate it on 160 LasDamas simulations. We demonstrate that reconstruction sharpens the BAO feature in the angle averaged galaxy correlation function, reducing the non-linear smoothing scale Σnl from 8.1 to 4.4 Mpc h−1. Reconstruction also significantly reduces the effects of redshift-space distortions at the BAO scale, isotropizing the correlation function. This sharpened BAO feature yields an unbiased distance estimate (<0.2 per cent) and reduces the scatter from 3.3 to 2.1 per cent. We demonstrate the robustness of these results to the various reconstruction parameters, including the smoothing scale, the galaxy bias and the linear growth rate. Applying this reconstruction algorithm to the SDSS LRG DR7 sample improves the significance of the BAO feature in these data from 3.3σ for the unreconstructed correlation function to 4.2σ after reconstruction. We estimate a relative distance scale DV/rs to z = 0.35 of 8.88 ± 0.17, where rs is the sound horizon and is a combination of the angular diameter distance DA and Hubble parameter H. Assuming a sound horizon of 154.25 Mpc, this translates into a distance measurement DV(z = 0.35) = 1.356 ± 0.025 Gpc. We find that reconstruction reduces the distance error in the DR7 sample from 3.5 to 1.9 per cent, equivalent to a survey with three times the volume of SDSS.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85f662aa83a0ecce0fb0095a2f7bdc0e2af22694

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

The DESI Experiment Part I: Science,Targeting, and Survey Design (2016, result): “truction also mitigates the shifts in the distance scale due to nonlinear evolution, with numerical tests showing suppression to below 0:1%. Reconstruction was rst applied to the SDSSII galaxy survey [11], improving the statistical precision by a factor of 1:7. Galaxy samples from more recent SDSS r”
Modelling the anisotropic two-point galaxy correlation function on small scales and single-probe measurements of H(z), DA(z) and f(z)σ8(z) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 luminous red galaxies (2012, unknown): “1 http://www.euclid-emc.org/ et al. 2009; Kazin et al. 2010a; Chuang, Wang & Hemantha 2012; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Samushia et al. 2012).”
A MEASUREMENT OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES FROM THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, methodology): “We include measurements of the BAO feature from SDSS (Anderson et al. 2012; Padmanabhan et al. 2012) and 6dF data (Beutler et al. 2011).”
The Completed SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Lyα Forests (2020, background): “…(Percival et al. 2007, 2010; Beutler et al. 2011; Blake et al. 2011; Anderson et al. 2012, 2014a, 2014b; Chuang & Wang 2012; Mehta et al. 2012; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Xu et al. 2013; Ross et al. 2015; Alam et al. 2017; Bautista et al. 2018), galaxy clusters (Hong et al. 2016), and quasars…”
Improved cosmological constraints from a joint analysis of the SDSS-II and SNLS supernova samples (2014, methodology): “…= rs(zdrag) Dv(z) (21) with: Dv(z) = ( (1 + z)2D2A cz H(z) )1/3 · (22) For this work, we follow Planck Collaboration XVI (2014) in using the measurement of the BAO scale at z = 0.106, 0.35, and 0.57 from Beutler et al. (2011); Padmanabhan et al. (2012); Anderson et al. (2012), respectively.”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications of the configuration-space clustering wedges (2016, methodology): “…et al. (2016b) perform BAO-only fits to the Legengre multipoles of order = 0, 2 of the two-point functions in configuration and Fourier space obtained after the application of the reconstruction technique (Eisenstein et al. 2007; Padmanabhan et al. 2012) as described in Cuesta et al. (2016).”
An Overview of CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (2022, methodology): “…observing the distribution of optically-detected galaxies, using either spectroscopic (Percival et al. 2007; Beutler et al. 2011; Blake et al. 2011; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Anderson et al. 2012; Ross et al. 2015; Alam et al. 2017, 2021) or photometric (Seo et al. 2012; DES Collaboration et al.…”
Weighing the giants – IV. Cosmology and neutrino mass (2014, background): “…type Ia supernovae (Suzuki et al. 2012) and baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data from the combination of results from the 6-degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dF; z = 0.106; Beutler et al. 2011) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, z = 0.35 and 0.57; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Anderson et al. 2014).”
An accurate halo model for fitting non-linear cosmological power spectra and baryonic feedback models (2015, background): “However, the most successful cosmological probes to date focus on the regime of linear perturbations, for example baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO; e.g.,Padmanabhan et al. 2012) or the cosmic microwave background (e.g.,Planck Collaboration XIII 2015).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “A recent reanalysis of the DR7 sample by Padmanabhan et al. (2012) and Xu et al. (2012b) improved the distance precision to 1.9% by applying the reconstruction technique described in §4.3.3 below.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III DR9 Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: testing deviations from Λ and general relativity using anisotropic clustering of galaxies (2012, background): “2011; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Anderson et al. 2012).”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “…we use a combination of three measurements at different redshifts: the WiggleZ survey covering the redshift range 0.3 < z < 0.9 (Blake et al. 2011), the SDSS-II survey (DR7) covering 0.16 < z < 0.44 (Padmanabhan et al. 2012), and the BOSS survey covering 0.43 < z < 0.7 (Anderson et al. 2012).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Measuring growth rate and geometry with anisotropic clustering (2013, methodology): “…highlights include the BAO measurements from the 6dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (6dFGRS; Beutler et al. 2011), Sloan Digital Sky Survey II (SDSS-II; Padmanabhan et al. 2012), SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Data Release 9 sample (DR9; Anderson et al. 2012), WiggleZ survey…”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample (2016, methodology): “The reconstruction algorithm we use is described in Padmanabhan et al. (2012).”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: observational systematics and baryon acoustic oscillations in the correlation function (2016, methodology): “This work uses the ‘combined’ BOSS galaxy catalog to determine BAO scale distance measurements, making use of density field ‘reconstruction’ (c.f., Padmanabhan et al. 2012).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements and the strong power of f(z)σ8(z) on constraining dark energy (2013, methodology): “…Montesano et al. 2011), and the correlation function method (see, e.g., Eisenstein et al. 2005; Okumura et al. 2008; Cabre & Gaztanaga 2009; Martinez et al. 2009; Sanchez et al. 2009; Kazin et al. 2010a; Chuang, Wang, & Hemantha 2012; Samushia et al. 2011; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Xu et al. 2012).”