Improved Forecasts for the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Cosmological Distance Scale

By H. Seo, Daniel J. Eisenstein. 2007

285 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the cosmological distance errors achievable using the baryonic acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler. We begin from a Fisher matrix formalism that is upgraded from earlier Seo and Eisenstein work. We isolate the information from the baryonic peaks by excluding distance information from other less robust sources. Meanwhile, we accommodate the Lagrangian displacement distribution into the Fisher matrix calculation to reflect the gradual loss of information in scale and in time due to nonlinear growth, nonlinear bias, and nonlinear redshift distortions. We then show that we can contract the multidimensional Fisher matrix calculations into a two-dimensional or even one-dimensional formalism with physically motivated approximations. We present the resulting fitting formula for the cosmological distance errors from galaxy redshift surveys as a function of survey parameters and nonlinearity, which saves us going through the 12 dimensional Fisher matrix calculations. Finally, we show excellent agreement between the distance error estimates from the revised Fisher matrix and the precision on the distance scale recovered from N-body simulations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cae09c05eceb50a65bd0983f226a9aac397657c3

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Citations in the corpus

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): “To ensure a robust BAO distance measurement within each redshift slice while maximizing the tomographic information, we employ a Fisher matrix forecast following the method developed in Seo & Eisenstein (2007).”
How to evade the sample variance limit on measurements of redshift-space distortions (2008, methodology): “Blue (dotted) shows BAO alone, with the lower curve using the above kmax and the upper curve using smaller scales as described in [25] (the rest of the curves effectively use the weaker version).”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Fourier space (2016, methodology): “Surprisingly, however, it seems that the difference is mostly accounted for by the difference between our fiducial cosmology and the WMAP3 cosmology hard-coded in the Seo & Eisenstein (2007) code.”
The detectability of baryonic acoustic oscillations in future galaxy surveys. (2007, methodology): “However, if we use the value of knl suggested by Seo & Eisenstein (2007), which they extract from a dark matter simulation, we find that their prescription gives an optimistic estimate of the error on α.”
The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: a tomographic measurement of cosmic structure growth and expansion rate based on optimal redshift weights (2018, background): “We assume that the corresponding velocity dispersion, σ v , is proportional to (1 + z)/H(z) during evolution (Seo & Eisenstein 2007), thus, σv(z) = Hf (zp) Hf (z) α‖(z) α‖(zp) 1 + z 1 + zp σv(zp) (16)”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measuring DA and H at z = 0.57 from the baryon acoustic peak in the data release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample (2013, methodology): “Simulations and analytic theory predict shifts below 1% in conventional models (Seo & Eisenstein 2003; Springel et al. 2005; Huff et al. 2007; Seo & Eisenstein 2007; Angulo et al. 2008; Padmanabhan & White 2009; Seo et al. 2010; Mehta et al. 2011).”
Large-Scale Anisotropic Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies (2007, methodology): “Recently, methods which directly use anisotropy of the baryon acoustic oscillations have been theoretically developed for both the power spectrum (Hu & Haiman 2003; Seo & Eisenstein 2003; Glazebrook & Blake 2005; Seo & Eisenstein 2007) and the 2PCF (Matsubara 2004).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillation scale in the distribution of galaxies to redshift 1 (2017, unknown): “Indeed, our recovered value is close to the value of 5.6 h−1 Mpc one obtains when extrapolating the discussion preceding equation (3) of Seo & Eisenstein (2007) to z = 0.8 and σ 8 = 0.8.”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA (2015, methodology): “We use the Fisher matrix formalism of Seo & Eisenstein (2007) to determine BAO-based errors on the angular diameter distance and the Hubble parameter given an observing volume, number density and bias of galaxies.”
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 Galaxy Sample (2009, background): “…results from simulations show that we should expect a less significant shift between the BAO positions in the linear matter and galaxy power spectra than the 1.3 per cent shift found for the LN catalogues (Seo & Eisenstein 2003; Springel et al. 2005; Seo & Eisenstein 2007; Angulo et al. 2008).”
SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 12: galaxy target selection and large-scale structure catalogues (2015, methodology): “For consistency, all calculations used the code of Seo & Eisenstein (2007), approximating each survey as a single volume, limited in redshift and area, and sampled by a constant density of galaxies, with numbers approximately matching those of the actual surveys.”
Cosmological parameter constraints from SDSS luminous red galaxies: a new treatment of large-scale clustering (2009, background): “…as a standard ruler which can be used to measure the distance–redshift relation, and hence constrain the dark energy equation of state (Blake & Glazebrook 2003; Hu & Haiman 2003; Linder 2003; Seo & Eisenstein 2003; Wang 2006; Guzik, Bernstein & Smith 2007; Seo & Eisenstein 2007; Seo et al. 2008).”