On the Robustness of the Acoustic Scale in the Low-Redshift Clustering of Matter

By Daniel J. Eisenstein, H. Seo, M. White. 2006

402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the effects of nonlinear structure formation on the signature of acoustic oscillations in the late-time galaxy distribution. We argue that the dominant nonlinear effect is the differential motion of pairs of tracers separated by 150 Mpc. These motions are driven by bulk flows and cluster formation and are much smaller than the acoustic scale itself. We present a model for the nonlinear evolution based on the distribution of pairwise Lagrangian displacements that provides a quantitative model for the degradation of the acoustic signature, even for biased tracers in redshift space. The Lagrangian displacement distribution can be calibrated with a significantly smaller set of simulations than would be needed to construct a precise power spectrum. By connecting the acoustic signature in the Fourier basis with that in the configuration basis, we show that the acoustic signature is more robust than the usual Fourier-space intuition would suggest, because the beat frequency between the peaks and troughs of the acoustic oscillations is a very small wavenumber that is well inside the linear regime. We argue that any possible shift of the acoustic scale is related to infall on a scale of 150 Mpc, which is O(0.5%) fractionally at first order, even at z = 0. For the matter, there is a first-order cancellation such that the mean shift is O(10-4). However, galaxy bias can circumvent this cancellation and produce a subpercent systematic bias.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b996b2a7a30047335989f5670ea2daf295661175

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Citations in the corpus

The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample (2016, background): “…spectrum), and simulations and perturbation theory calculations indicate that non-linear evolution and galaxy bias can shift the location of the BAO peak at a level of 0.2 − 0.5% (Eisenstein et al. 2007b; Padmanabhan & White 2009; Seo et al. 2010; Mehta et al. 2011; Sherwin & Zaldarriaga 2012).”
The Completed SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Lyα Forests (2020, methodology): “The correction for nonlinear broadening of the BAO peak (Eisenstein et al. 2007) is parameterized by S Ŝ,( ) , with S =^ -h3.”
Cosmological parameters from large scale structure - geometric versus shape information (2010, background): “This aspect of nonlinear evolution can be modelled by considering the smeared power spectrum [28], a scale-weighted average of the linear power spectrum Plin(k) and a featureless no-wiggle spectrum Pnw(k),”
Cosmological parameters from the BOSS galaxy power spectrum (2019, background): “It has long been known that the shape of the BAO peak is very sensitive to large displacements or bulk flows [19–21].”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the correlation function of LOWZ and CMASS galaxies in Data Release 12 (2015, methodology): “Compared to Anderson et al. (2012), we have increased the number of points in the random catalogues used both when estimating the displacement field, and when sampling this field to give the shifted field (see Eisenstein et al. 2007b; Anderson et al. 2012; Padmanabhan et al. 2012, for definitions).”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: mapping the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations (2011, methodology): “We then incorporated the damping of the baryon acoustic peak caused by the displacement of matter due to bulk flows (Eisenstein et al. 2007, Crocce & Scoccimarro 2008, Matsubara 2008) by interpolating between the linear and reference power spectra using a Gaussian damping term g(k) ≡ exp…”
Large-Scale Anisotropic Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies (2007, methodology): “The degradation of the acoustic signature was well modeled; it was shown that the acoustic peak of the linear density field in the 2PCF can be reconstructed (Eisenstein et al. 2007a,b).”
Baryon acoustic oscillations at z = 2.34 from the correlations of Lyα absorption in eBOSS DR14 (2019, background): “Moreover, in order to incorporate the effects of the non-linear growth of matter that lead to broadening of the BAO peak, the peak term is corrected by a Gaussian factor (Eisenstein et al. 2007).”
Cosmological constraints from the clustering of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 luminous red galaxies (vol 404, pg 60, 2010) (2009, methodology): “The primary effect of non-linear structure formation and peculiar velocities on the BAOs is to damp them at large k. Eisenstein et al. (2007b) showed that this can be accurately modelled as a Gaussian smoothing, where Pdamp(k, p, σ ) = Plin(k, p)e− k 2σ2 2 + Pnw(k, p) ( 1 − e− k 2σ2 2 ) .”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in Fourier space (2016, methodology): “We fix NL to be 3.3 h−1 Mpc, which is motivated by numeric simulations (Eisenstein et al. 2007a; Seo et al. 2016).”
Equivalence Principle and the Baryon Acoustic Peak (2015, neutral): “[11, 12]) to model the broadening effects:”
Measuring DA and H at z = 0.35 from the SDSS DR7 LRGs using baryon acoustic oscillations (2012, methodology): “This method is extended from the original reconstruction algorithm proposed in Eisenstein et al. (2007b) and its theoretical basis is established in Padmanabhan et al. (2009) and Noh et al. (2009).”
Cosmological non-linearities as an effective fluid (2010, background): “the broadening of the BAO peak is described by the following phenomenological ansatz [63, 64] Pobs(k) = e − 1 2 22PL(k) + Pmc(k) , (6.”
The clustering of galaxies in the sdss-iii baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey: Baryon acoustic oscillations in the data release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample (2012, methodology): “In order to account for the effects of non-linear evolution on the BAO feature, the BAO in these templates is artificially smeared out according to the prescription given in Eisenstein et al. (2007b).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “Eisenstein et al. (2007a) show that a simple reconstruction scheme based on applying the (reversed) Zel’dovich approximation to the smoothed non-linear density field is remarkably successful at recovering BAO information, effectively shifting the low redshift curves in Figure 11 back towards the…”