Constraint on the growth factor of the cosmic structure from the damping of the baryon acoustic oscillation signature

TL;DR

This paper measures the damping of baryon acoustic oscillations in galaxy data to constrain the growth factor of cosmic structures, providing a new observational limit within a standard cosmological model.

Contribution

It presents the first constraint on the growth factor derived from BAO damping measurements in SDSS data, assuming a flat CDM cosmology.

Findings

Detected BAO damping at the one sigma level.

Measured _8 D_1(z=0.3) = 0.42^{+0.34}_{-0.28}.

Supports the use of BAO damping as a probe of structure growth.

Abstract

We determine a constraint on the growth factor by measuring the damping of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the matter power spectrum using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey luminous red galaxy sample. The damping of the BAO is detected at the one sigma level. We obtain \sigma_8D_1(z=0.3) = 0.42^{+0.34}_{-0.28} at the 1\sigma statistical level, where \sigma_8 is the root mean square overdensity in a sphere of radius 8h^{-1}Mpc and D_1(z) is the growth factor at redshift z. The above result assumes that other parameters are fixed and the cosmology is taken to be a spatially flat cold dark matter universe with the cosmological constant.