Forecasting the Dark Energy Measurement with Baryon Acoustic Oscillations: Prospects for the LAMOST surveys

TL;DR

This paper forecasts the potential of LAMOST surveys to measure dark energy parameters using baryon acoustic oscillations, analyzing different survey strategies and their expected precision.

Contribution

It provides a detailed forecast of dark energy measurement precision for various LAMOST survey configurations using Fisher matrix and MCMC methods.

Findings

High-precision dark energy constraints are achievable with optimized survey designs.

Different survey types yield varying levels of accuracy in cosmological parameter estimation.

Survey parameters such as magnitude limits and target selection significantly impact measurement precision.

Abstract

The Large Area Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) is a dedicated spectroscopic survey telescope being built in China, with an effective aperture of 4 meters and equiped with 4000 fibers. Using the LAMOST telescope, one could make redshift survey of the large scale structure (LSS). The baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) features in the LSS power spectrum provide standard rulers for measuring dark energy and other cosmological parameters. In this paper we investigate the meaurement precision achievable for a few possible surveys: (1) a magnitude limited survey of all galaxies, (2) a survey of color selected red luminous galaxies (LRG), and (3) a magnitude limited, high density survey of z<2 quasars. For each survey, we use the halo model to estimate the bias of the sample, and calculate the effective volume. We then use the Fisher matrix method to forecast the error on the dark energy equation of state and other cosmological parameters for different survey parameters. In a few cases we also use the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to make the same forecast as a comparison. The fiber time required for each of these surveys is also estimated. These results would be useful in designing the surveys for LAMOST.