Clustering tomography: measuring cosmological distances through angular clustering in thin redshift shells

Abstract

We test the cosmological implications of studying galaxy clustering using a tomographic approach, by computing the galaxy two-point angular correlation function $\omega (\theta )$ in thin redshift shells using a spectroscopic-redshift galaxy survey. The advantages of this procedure are that it is not necessary to assume a fiducial cosmology in order to convert measured angular positions and redshifts into distances, and that it gives several (less accurate) measurements of the angular diameter distance $D_\rm{A}(z)$ instead of only one (more precise) measurement of the effective average distance $D_\rm{V}(z)$, which results in better constraints on the expansion history of the Universe. We test our model for $\omega (\theta )$ and its covariance matrix against a set of mock galaxy catalogues and show that this technique is able to extract unbiased cosmological constraints. Also, assuming the best-fit $\Lambda$CDM cosmology from the cosmic microwave background measurements from the Planck satellite, we forecast the result of applying this tomographic approach to the final Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey catalogue in combination with Planck for three flat cosmological models, and compare them with the expected results of the isotropic baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements post-reconstruction on the same galaxy catalogue combined with Planck. While BAOs are more accurate for constraining cosmological parameters for the standard $\Lambda$CDM model, the tomographic technique gives better results when we allow the dark energy equation of state $w_{DE}$ to deviate from $-1$, resulting in a performance similar to BAOs in the case of a constant value of $w_{DE}$, and a moderate improvement in the case of a time-dependent value of $w_{DE}$, increasing the value of the Figure-of-Merit in the $w_0-w_a$ plane up to $15\%$.

13 pages, 1 table, 10 figures. Accepted in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in configuration space
• Angular Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measure at z=2.225 from the SDSS quasar survey
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the SDSS DR10 galaxies angular correlation function
• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in Fourier space
• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Angular clustering tomography and its cosmological implications
• Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Galaxy Sample for BAO Measurement
• Baryon acoustic oscillations signature in the three-point angular correlation function from the SDSS-DR12 quasar survey
• Extracting cosmological information from the angular power spectrum of the 2MASS Photometric Redshift catalogue
• AMICO galaxy clusters in KiDS-DR3: Cosmological constraints from angular power spectrum and correlation function
• On the tomographic cluster clustering as a cosmological probe
• FuGa3D: Fast full-sky analysis of Galaxy catalogs in 3D
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in tomographic Angular Density and Redshift Fluctuations