Reliability of the detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak

TL;DR

This paper confirms the detection of the baryon acoustic peak in large-scale matter distribution using SDSS DR7 and 2dF survey data, emphasizing the peak's reliability and broader appearance compared to earlier findings.

Contribution

First to analyze the large-scale correlation function in SDSS DR7 and 2dF data, validating the baryon acoustic peak detection with careful error estimation.

Findings

Confirmed the baryon acoustic peak at ~100 Mpc/h

Peak appears broader than in previous detections

Demonstrated reliability of large-scale correlation measurements

Abstract

The correlation function of the distribution of matter in the universe shows, at large scales, baryon acoustic oscillations, which were imprinted prior to recombination. This feature was first detected in the correlation function of the luminous red galaxies (LRG) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The final release (DR7) of the SDSS has been recently made available, and the useful volume is about two times bigger than in the old sample. We present here, for the first time, the redshift space correlation function of this sample at large scales together with that for one shallower, but denser volume-limited subsample drawn from the 2dF redshift survey. We test the reliability of the detection of the acoustic peak at about 100 Mpc/h and the behaviour of the correlation function at larger scales by means of careful estimation of errors. We confirm the presence of the peak in the latest data although broader than in previous detections.