Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Measurement of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Three-dimensional Clustering

Abstract

The three-dimensional correlation function offers an effective way to summarize the correlation of the large-scale structure even for imaging galaxy surveys. We have applied the projected three-dimensional correlation function, ${\xi }_{\mathrm{p}}$ to measure the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) scale on the first-three years Dark Energy Survey data. The sample consists of about 7 million galaxies in the redshift range $0.6<z_{\mathrm{p}}<1.1$ over a footprint of $4108{\mathrm{deg}}^2$. Our theory modeling includes the impact of realistic true redshift distributions beyond Gaussian photo-$z$ approximation. To increase the signal-to-noise of the measurements, a Gaussian stacking window function is adopted in place of the commonly used top-hat. Using the full sample, $D_{\mathrm{M}}(z_{\mathrm{eff}})/r_{\mathrm{s}}$, the ratio between the comoving angular diameter distance and the sound horizon, is constrained to be $19.00\pm 0.67$ (top-hat) and $19.15\pm 0.58$ (Gaussian) at $z_{\mathrm{eff}}=0.835$. The constraint is weaker than the angular correlation $w$ constraint ($18.84\pm 0.50$) because the BAO signals are heterogeneous across redshift. When a homogeneous BAO-signal sub-sample in the range $0.7<z_{\mathrm{p}}<1.0$ ($z_{\mathrm{eff}}=0.845$) is considered, ${\xi }_{\mathrm{p}}$ yields $19.80\pm 0.67$ (top-hat) and $19.84\pm 0.53$ (Gaussian). The latter is mildly stronger than the $w$ constraint ($19.86\pm 0.55$). We find that the ${\xi }_{\mathrm{p}}$ results are more sensitive to photo-$z$ errors than $w$ because ${\xi }_{\mathrm{p}}$ keeps the three-dimensional clustering information causing it to be more prone to photo-$z$ noise. The Gaussian window gives more robust results than the top-hat as the former is designed to suppress the low signal modes. ${\xi }_{\mathrm{p}}$ and the angular statistics such as $w$ have their own pros and cons, and they serve an important crosscheck with each other.

20 pages, 12 figures, minor changes to match published version

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• Dark Energy Survey: A 2.1% measurement of the angular Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation scale at redshift $z_{\mathrm{eff}}$=0.85 from the final dataset
• Dark Energy Survey: Galaxy Sample for the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation Measurement from the Final Dataset
• HI Intensity Mapping with the MIGHTEE Survey: First Results of the HI Power Spectrum
• Optimizing Redshift Distribution Inference through Joint Self-Calibration and Clustering-Redshift Synergy
• Separating Angular and Radial Modes with Spherical-Fourier Bessel Power Spectrum on All Scales and Implications for Systematics Mitigation
• Dark Energy Survey: DESI-Independent Angular BAO Measurement
• Studying baryon acoustic oscillations using photometric redshifts from the DESI Legacy Imaging survey DR9
• Influence of photometric galaxies redshift distribution in BAO estimation