Improving Cosmological Distance Measurements by Reconstruction of the Baryon Acoustic Peak

By Daniel J. Eisenstein, H. Seo, E. Sirko, David N. Spergel. 2006

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The baryon acoustic oscillations are a promising route to the precision measure of the cosmological distance scale and hence the measurement of the time evolution of dark energy. We show that the nonlinear degradation of the acoustic signature in the correlations of low-redshift galaxies is a correctable process. By suitable reconstruction of the linear density field, one can sharpen the acoustic peak in the correlation function or, equivalently, restore the higher harmonics of the oscillations in the power spectrum. With this, one can achieve better measurements of the acoustic scale for a given survey volume. Reconstruction is particularly effective at low redshift, where the nonlinearities are worse but where the dark energy density is highest. At z = 0.3, we find that one can reduce the sample variance error bar on the acoustic scale by at least a factor of 2 and in principle by nearly a factor of 4. We discuss the significant implications our results have for the design of galaxy surveys aimed at measuring the distance scale through the acoustic peak.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff52cbd55ae2d72f2fd39e4934dd50baa9c06ad5

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Citations in the corpus

Combining full-shape and BAO analyses of galaxy power spectra: a 1.6% CMB-independent constraint on H0 (2020, background): “Such constraints are significantly sharpened by the process of density-field reconstruction [29–33], which reduces the information loss afforded by non-linear effects by displacing galaxies by an estimate of their large scale bulk flow.”
Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from two decades of spectroscopic surveys at the Apache Point Observatory (2020, methodology): “For measurements using discrete tracers with sufficiently high number density, the BAO feature in clustering measurements can be sharpened through a process known as ‘reconstruction’ (Eisenstein et al. 2007).”
The clustering of the SDSS DR7 Main Galaxy Sample I: a 4 per cent distance measure at z=0.15 (2014, methodology): “Reconstruction of galaxy clustering data (Eisenstein et al. 2007a) has now been shown to improve measurements of the BAO scale in multiple galaxy samples, including SDSS-II LRGs at z = 0.35 (Padmanabhan et al. 2012 and Xu et al. 2013), the SDSS-III BOSS LOWZ and CMASS samples (Anderson et al. 2014…”
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).”
Observational constraints on an interacting dark energy model (2009, background): “Finally, to match the definitions in Eisenstein et al. (2007) and Percival et al. (2007) (from where we take the BAO data) we multiply the result by their “phenomenological” factor 0.96; zdec = 0.96z̃dec.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological implications of the full shape of the clustering wedges in the data release 10 and 11 galaxy samples (2013, methodology): “After applying a modified version of the reconstruction technique of Eisenstein et al. (2007), the BAO signal in the galaxy clustering of BOSS SDSS Data Release 9 (DR9; Ahn et al. 2012) provided a 1.7 per cent accuracy measurement of the average distance DV(z) at z = 0.57 (Anderson et al. 2012), as…”
Galileon gravity in light of ISW, CMB, BAO and H0 data (2017, background): “ quartic and quintic sector of the model. In typical BAO analysis the reconstruction of the density eld of the galaxies plays a crucial role to reduce the error bars of the BAO measurements (see e.g. [106]). However, current reconstruction implementations have assumed GR. As statistics improve in BA”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Fourier space (2016, methodology): “The BAO method has been significantly strengthened by Eisenstein et al. (2007b), who showed that non-linear degradation effects are reversible by undoing the displacements of galaxies due to bulk flow that is the very cause of the structure growth and redshiftspace distortions.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: mock galaxy catalogues for the BOSS Final Data Release (2015, methodology): “One clear example is the case of BAO reconstruction techniques (see e.g. Eisenstein et al. 2007; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Anderson et al. 2014; Ross et al. 2015).”
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 ) .”