Power spectrum of the maxBCG sample: detection of acoustic oscillations using galaxy clusters

TL;DR

This study measures the galaxy cluster power spectrum from the maxBCG catalog, detecting baryonic acoustic oscillations with high significance, and demonstrates the potential of cluster surveys for cosmological insights.

Contribution

First detection of BAO in galaxy clusters using the maxBCG catalog, showing the feasibility of cluster surveys for cosmological measurements.

Findings

Detected BAO at ~2.5 sigma confidence level.

Power spectrum consistent with LCDM cosmology.

Cluster weighting improves BAO detection significance.

Abstract

We use the direct Fourier method to calculate the redshift-space power spectrum of the maxBCG cluster catalog -- currently by far the largest existing galaxy cluster sample. The total number of clusters used in our analysis is 12,616. After accounting for the radial smearing effect caused by photometric redshift errors and also introducing a simple treatment for the nonlinear effects, we show that currently favored low matter density "concordance" LCDM cosmology provides a very good fit to the estimated power. Thanks to the large volume (~0.4 h^{-3}Gpc^{3}), high clustering amplitude (linear effective bias parameter b_{eff} ~3x(0.85/sigma_8)), and sufficiently high sampling density (~3x10^{-5} h^{3}Mpc^{-3}) the recovered power spectrum has high enough signal to noise to allow us to find evidence (~2 sigma CL) for the baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO). In case the clusters are additionally weighted by their richness the resulting power spectrum has slightly higher large-scale amplitude and smaller damping on small scales. As a result the confidence level for the BAO detection is somewhat increased: ~2.5 sigma. The ability to detect BAO with relatively small number of clusters is encouraging in the light of several proposed large cluster surveys.