An analytic approach to baryon acoustic oscillations

Abstract

The fitting formula for the location of the first acoustic peak in the matter power spectrum is revised. We discuss the physics that leads to baryon acoustic oscillations: the recombination history, the tight coupling approximation and the velocity overshoot effect. A new fitting formula is proposed, which is in accordance within 5% with numerical results for a suitable range of cosmological parameters, whereas previous results yield deviations of up to 20%. The crucial improvement turns out to be the accuracy of the recombination history.

8 pages 6 figures, version accepted for publication in PRD (some refs. added, discussion improved)

References in corpus (19)

• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters
• Efficient Computation of CMB anisotropies in closed FRW models
• Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• Baryonic Features in the Matter Transfer Function
• Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous and Conformal Newtonian Gauges
• Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous vs. Conformal Newtonian Gauge
• Small Scale Cosmological Perturbations: An Analytic Approach
• A New Calculation of the Recombination Epoch
• Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background: An Analytic Approach
• How exactly did the Universe become neutral?
• How well do we understand cosmological recombination?
• Cosmological parameters from WMAP 5-year temperature maps
• Model-independent cosmological constraints from the CMB
• Cosmological perturbation theory
• Rico: An Accurate Cosmological Recombination Code
• Matter temperature after cosmological recombination
• Redshift-Space Enhancement of Line-of-Sight Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the SDSS Main-Galaxy Sample
• The tight-coupling approximation for baryon acoustic oscillations
• Photons and Baryons before Atoms: Improving the Tight-Coupling Approximation

Cited by in corpus (10)

• What do we really know about Dark Energy?
• Measuring the lensing potential with tomographic galaxy number counts
• A new method for the Alcock-Paczynski test
• General Relativistic corrections in density-shear correlations
• Analytic Spectra of CMB Anisotropies and Polarization Generated by Scalar Perturbations in Synchronous Gauge
• Detecting baryon acoustic oscillations by 3d weak lensing
• Nonstandard approach to gravity for the dark sector of the Universe
• Interacting photon-baryon fluid, warm dark matter and the first acoustic peak
• On the $2^{\text{nd}}$ feature of the matter two-point function
• The BAO scale -- how standard is the standard ruler?