A New Statistic for Analyzing Baryon Acoustic Oscillations

TL;DR

This paper introduces omega_l, a new configuration space statistic for analyzing baryon acoustic oscillations that localizes acoustic information and avoids large-scale power sensitivity, providing results consistent with traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper presents omega_l, a novel, easily implementable statistic that improves localization of acoustic information and reduces sensitivity to large-scale power in BAO analysis.

Findings

omega_l localizes acoustic information into a single dip

Results from omega_0 agree with power spectrum measurements

Equivalent acoustic information can be extracted using omega_0 or P(k)

Abstract

We introduce a new statistic omega_l for measuring and analyzing large-scale structure and particularly the baryon acoustic oscillations. omega_l is a band-filtered, configuration space statistic that is easily implemented and has advantages over the traditional power spectrum and correlation function estimators. Unlike these estimators, omega_l can localize most of the acoustic information into a single dip at the acoustic scale while also avoiding sensitivity to the poorly constrained large scale power (i.e., the integral constraint) through the use of a localized and compensated filter. It is also sensitive to anisotropic clustering through pair counting and does not require any binning. We measure the shift in the acoustic peak due to nonlinear effects using the monopole omega_0 derived from subsampled dark matter catalogues as well as from mock galaxy catalogues created via halo occupation distribution (HOD) modeling. All of these are drawn from 44 realizations of 1024^3 particle dark matter simulations in a 1h^{-1}Gpc box at z=1. We compare these shifts with those obtained from the power spectrum and conclude that the results agree. This indicates that any distance measurements obtained from omega_0 and P(k) will be consistent with each other. We also show that it is possible to extract the same amount of acoustic information using either omega_0 or P(k) from equal volume surveys.