Reconstructing baryon oscillations

TL;DR

This paper extends the theoretical understanding of baryon acoustic oscillation reconstruction by incorporating biased tracers and validates the approach through N-body simulations, improving the method's reliability.

Contribution

It advances the analytic formalism for BAO reconstruction to include biased tracers and tests its validity with N-body simulations, bridging theory and practical application.

Findings

LPT explains trends in simulations for mass and biased tracers

Reconstruction effectiveness is supported by simulation results

Implications for improving BAO measurements are discussed

Abstract

The baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) method for constraining the expansion history is adversely affected by non-linear structure formation, which washes out the correlation function peak created at decoupling. To increase the constraining power of low z BAO experiments, it has been proposed that one use the observed distribution of galaxies to "reconstruct'' the acoustic peak. Recently Padmanabhan, White and Cohn provided an analytic formalism for understanding how reconstruction works within the context of Lagrangian perturbation theory. We extend that formalism to include the case of biased tracers of the mass and, because the quantitative validity of LPT is questionable, we investigate reconstruction in N-body simulations. We find that LPT does a good job of explaining the trends seen in simulations for both the mass and for biased tracers and comment upon the implications this has for reconstruction.