Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Ly-\alpha\ forest of BOSS quasars

By N. Busca, T. Delubac, J. Rich, S. Bailey, A. Font-Ribera, David Kirkby, J. Goff, M. Pieri, A. Slosar, 'Eric Aubourg and 52 more. 2012

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We report a detection of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the three-dimensional correlation function of the transmitted flux fraction in the \Lya forest of high-redshift quasars. The study uses 48,640 quasars in the redshift range $2.1\le z \le 3.5$ from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the third generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III). At a mean redshift $z=2.3$, we measure the monopole and quadrupole components of the correlation function for separations in the range $20\hMpc<r<200\hMpc$. A peak in the correlation function is seen at a separation equal to $(1.01\pm0.03)$ times the distance expected for the BAO peak within a concordance $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. This first detection of the BAO peak at high redshift, when the universe was strongly matter dominated, results in constraints on the angular diameter distance $\da$ and the expansion rate $H$ at $z=2.3$ that, combined with priors on $H_0$ and the baryon density, require the existence of dark energy. Combined with constraints derived from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations, this result implies $H(z=2.3)=(224\pm8){\rm km\,s^{-1}Mpc^{-1}}$, indicating that the time derivative of the cosmological scale parameter $\dot{a}=H(z=2.3)/(1+z)$ is significantly greater than that measured with BAO at $z\sim0.5$. This demonstrates that the expansion was decelerating in the range $0.7<z<2.3$, as expected from the matter domination during this epoch. Combined with measurements of $H_0$, one sees the pattern of deceleration followed by acceleration characteristic of a dark-energy dominated universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce078b10e714cbb08730416dbc10737d5fe5811b

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Citations in the corpus

Target Selection and Validation of DESI Quasars (2022, background): “This field of research has developed over more than two decades (McDonald 2003; Busca et al. 2013; Slosar et al. 2013) and reached its peak with the two recent publications of eBOSS (Chabanier et al. 2019; du Mas des Bourboux et al. 2020).”
Tension and constraints on modified gravity parametrizations of $G_{\textrm{eff}}(z)$ from growth rate and Planck data (2017, background): “Such observations include earlier analyses of cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations [6], large scale velocity flows [7], baryon acoustic oscillations [8, 9] Type Ia supernovae [10], early growth rate of perturbations data[11–14], gamma ray”
An Overview of CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (2022, background): “…Ross et al. 2015; Alam et al. 2017, 2021) or photometric (Seo et al. 2012; DES Collaboration et al. 2019, 2021) catalogs, and at higher redshifts in Lyman-alpha systems (e.g. Busca et al. 2013; Slosar et al. 2013; du Mas des Bourboux et al. 2020) and quasars (Ata et al. 2018; Neveux et al. 2020).”
HUBBLE PARAMETER MEASUREMENT CONSTRAINTS ON THE COSMOLOGICAL DECELERATION–ACCELERATION TRANSITION REDSHIFT (2013, methodology): “Granted, the Busca et al. (2012) z = 2.3 measurement carries great weight because of the small, 3.6%, uncertainty, but 9 of our 10 highredshift measurements from Simon et al. (2005), Stern et al. (2010), and Moresco et al. (2012) include three 11%, 13%, and 14% measurements from Moresco et al.…”