Detecting Baryon Acoustic Oscillations

Abstract

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations are a feature imprinted in the galaxy distribution by acoustic waves traveling in the plasma of the early universe. Their detection at the expected scale in large-scale structures strongly supports current cosmological models with a nearly linear evolution from redshift approximately 1000, and the existence of dark energy. Besides, BAOs provide a standard ruler for studying cosmic expansion. In this paper we focus on methods for BAO detection using the correlation function measurement. For each method, we want to understand the tested hypothesis (the hypothesis H0 to be rejected) and the underlying assumptions. We first present wavelet methods which are mildly model-dependent and mostly sensitive to the BAO feature. Then we turn to fully model-dependent methods. We present the most often used method based on the chi^2 statistic, but we find it has limitations. In general the assumptions of the chi^2 method are not verified, and it only gives a rough estimate of the significance. The estimate can become very wrong when considering more realistic hypotheses, where the covariance matrix of the measurement depends on cosmological parameters. Instead we propose to use a new method based on two modifications: we modify the procedure for computing the significance and make it rigorous, and we modify the statistic to obtain better results in the case of varying covariance matrix. We verify with simulations that correct significances are different from the ones obtained using the classical chi^2 procedure. We also test a simple example of varying covariance matrix. In this case we find that our modified statistic outperforms the classical chi^2 statistic when both significances are correctly computed. Finally we find that taking into account variations of the covariance matrix can change both BAO detection levels and cosmological parameter constraints.

References in corpus (10)

• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• Cosmological Constraints from the SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• Measuring the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation scale using the SDSS and 2dFGRS
• On the Robustness of the Acoustic Scale in the Low-Redshift Clustering of Matter
• Report of the Dark Energy Task Force
• The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: testing the cosmological model with baryon acoustic oscillations at z=0.6
• Shrinkage Estimation of the Power Spectrum Covariance Matrix
• Have Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations in the galaxy distribution really been measured?
• Redshift-Space Enhancement of Line-of-Sight Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the SDSS Main-Galaxy Sample
• Uncertainty in 2-point correlation function estimators and BAO detection in SDSS DR7

Cited by in corpus (14)

• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Data Release 10 and 11 galaxy samples
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Data Release 9 Spectroscopic Galaxy Sample
• Exact Wavelets on the Ball
• S2LET: A code to perform fast wavelet analysis on the sphere
• KROSS-SAMI: A Direct IFS Comparison of the Tully-Fisher Relation Across 8 Gyr Since $z\approx 1$
• The KMOS Galaxy Evolution Survey (KGES): the angular momentum of star-forming galaxies over the last ~10 Gyr
• Density-dependent clustering: I. Pulling back the curtains on motions of the BAO peak
• Comparisons between fast algorithms for the continuous wavelet transform and applications in cosmology: the 1D case
• Continuous wavelet analysis of matter clustering using the Gaussian-derived wavelet
• Effect of model-dependent covariance matrix for studying Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
• K-CLASH: spatially-resolving star-forming galaxies in field and cluster environments at $z\approx 0.2$-$0.6$
• Detecting baryon acoustic oscillations by 3d weak lensing
• A quasi-Gaussian approximation for the probability distribution of correlation functions
• Constrained correlation functions from the Millennium Simulation