The BigBOSS Experiment

Abstract

BigBOSS is a Stage IV ground-based dark energy experiment to study baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and the growth of structure with a wide-area galaxy and quasar redshift survey over 14,000 square degrees. It has been conditionally accepted by NOAO in response to a call for major new instrumentation and a high-impact science program for the 4-m Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak. The BigBOSS instrument is a robotically-actuated, fiber-fed spectrograph capable of taking 5000 simultaneous spectra over a wavelength range from 340 nm to 1060 nm, with a resolution R = 3000-4800. Using data from imaging surveys that are already underway, spectroscopic targets are selected that trace the underlying dark matter distribution. In particular, targets include luminous red galaxies (LRGs) up to z = 1.0, extending the BOSS LRG survey in both redshift and survey area. To probe the universe out to even higher redshift, BigBOSS will target bright [OII] emission line galaxies (ELGs) up to z = 1.7. In total, 20 million galaxy redshifts are obtained to measure the BAO feature, trace the matter power spectrum at smaller scales, and detect redshift space distortions. BigBOSS will provide additional constraints on early dark energy and on the curvature of the universe by measuring the Ly-alpha forest in the spectra of over 600,000 2.2 < z < 3.5 quasars. BigBOSS galaxy BAO measurements combined with an analysis of the broadband power, including the Ly-alpha forest in BigBOSS quasar spectra, achieves a FOM of 395 with Planck plus Stage III priors. This FOM is based on conservative assumptions for the analysis of broad band power (kmax = 0.15), and could grow to over 600 if current work allows us to push the analysis to higher wave numbers (kmax = 0.3). BigBOSS will also place constraints on theories of modified gravity and inflation, and will measure the sum of neutrino masses to 0.024 eV accuracy.

This report is based on the BigBOSS proposal submission to NOAO in October 2010, and reflects the project status at that time with minor updates

Cited by in corpus (63)

• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: mock galaxy catalogues for the BOSS Final Data Release
• Measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyman-alpha Forest Fluctuations in BOSS Data Release 9
• Project Overview of the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements and the strong power of normalized growth rate on constraining dark energy
• Modelling Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Perturbation Theory and Stochastic Halo Biasing
• The Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Broadband and Broad-beam Array: Design Overview and Sensitivity Forecasts
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements from CMASS anisotropic galaxy clustering
• Ultra large-scale cosmology in next-generation experiments with single tracers
• A first application of the Alcock-Paczynski test to stacked cosmic voids
• The nature of the Diffuse Gamma-Ray Background
• On using angular cross-correlations to determine source redshift distributions
• A New Method to Correct for Fiber Collisions in Galaxy Two-Point Statistics
• The circumgalactic medium of eBOSS emission line galaxies: signatures of galactic outflows in gas distribution and kinematics
• Defining a weak lensing experiment in space
• The Large-scale Distribution of Cool Gas around Luminous Red Galaxies
• UNIT project: Universe $N$-body simulations for the Investigation of Theoretical models from galaxy surveys
• The Spatial Clustering of ROSAT All-Sky Survey AGNs III. Expanded Sample and Comparison with Optical AGNs
• The Effect of Fiber Collisions on the Galaxy Power Spectrum Multipole
• Observational Evidence of the Accelerated Expansion of the Universe
• A Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Features in the SDSS BOSS DR12 Galaxy Bispectrum
• Voids in the SDSS DR9: observations, simulations, and the impact of the survey mask
• The BOSS-WiggleZ overlap region I: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
• Near-ultraviolet Spectroscopy of Star-forming Galaxies from eBOSS: Signatures of Ubiquitous Galactic-scale Outflows
• New approach for precise computation of Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum with hydrodynamical simulations
• Calcium H & K Induced by Galaxy Halos
• Supervoids in the WISE-2MASS catalogue imprinting Cold Spots in the Cosmic Microwave Background
• One hundred SMUDGes in S-PLUS: ultra-diffuse galaxies flourish in the field
• Observational signatures of modified gravity on ultra-large scales
• Characterizing the Galactic White Dwarf Binary Population with Sparsely Sampled Radial Velocity Data
• The dark matter of galaxy voids
• Probing deviations from General Relativity with the Euclid spectroscopic survey
• Systematically Measuring Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (SMUDGes). II. Expanded Survey Description and the Stripe 82 Catalog
• Measuring Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the clustering of voids
• Internal kinematics of groups of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7
• Clustering of X-Ray-Selected AGN
• Estimating the power spectrum covariance matrix with fewer mock samples
• Effects of large-scale environment on the assembly history of central galaxies
• A comparison of the galaxy peculiar velocity field with the PSCz gravity field-- A Bayesian hyper-parameter method
• Hunting down systematics in baryon acoustic oscillations after cosmic high noon
• Accurate determination of halo velocity bias in simulations and its cosmological implications
• White Paper: Measuring the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy
• The Clustering of Galaxies in the Completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmic Flows and Cosmic Web from Luminous Red Galaxies
• Identifying Tidal Disruption Events via Prior Photometric Selection of Their Preferred Hosts
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). Measuring nonlinear galaxy bias at z~0.8
• Dark matter halo occupation: environment and clustering
• Improving Fisher matrix forecasts for galaxy surveys: window function, bin cross-correlation, and bin redshift uncertainty
• Cosmological parameter inference from galaxy clustering: The effect of the posterior distribution of the power spectrum
• Characterizing unknown systematics in large scale structure surveys
• Discrimination between Lambda-CDM, quintessence, and modified gravity models using wide area surveys
• Generalised Fisher Matrices
• Constraints on a scale-dependent bias from galaxy clustering
• On the measurement of cosmological parameters
• End effects in optical fibres
• Kriging Interpolating Cosmic Velocity Field
• The Dark Energy Spectrometer (DESpec): A Multi-Fiber Spectroscopic Upgrade of the Dark Energy Camera and Survey for the Blanco Telescope
• Unbiased contaminant removal for 3D galaxy power spectrum measurements
• On the limitations of statistical absorption studies with the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys I--III
• Testing the local-void alternative to dark energy using galaxy pairs
• Beyond boundaries of redshift surveys: assessing mass fluctuations on "super-survey" scales
• Optimizing future dark energy surveys for model selection goals
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillation detections from the clustering of massive halos and different density region tracers in TianNu simulation
• Neutrino mass from the Lyman-Alpha forest
• Fluids in cosmology