Investigating The Uncertainty On The BAO Scale Measured From Future Photometric And Spectroscopic Surveys

TL;DR

This paper assesses how photometric redshift errors impact the measurement of the BAO signal in future large-scale surveys like LSST, using simulations to compare photometric and spectroscopic approaches.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of the effects of photometric redshift uncertainties on BAO measurements for upcoming surveys.

Findings

Photometric redshift errors significantly affect BAO signal reconstruction.

Spectroscopic surveys like BigBOSS offer more precise BAO measurements.

Simulations help quantify uncertainties and guide survey strategies.

Abstract

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a wide (20,000 sq.deg.) and deep ugrizy imaging survey which will be sited at Cerro Pachon in Chile. A major scientific goal of LSST is to constrain dark energy parameters via the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal. Crucial to this technique is the measurement of well-understood photometric redshifts, derived from the survey ugrizy imaging. Here we present the results of the effect of simulated photometric redshift (PZ) errors on the reconstruction of the BAO signal. We generate many "Monte Carlo" simulations of galaxies from a model power spectrum using Fast Fourier Transform techniques. Mock galaxy properties are assigned using an algorithm that reproduces observed luminosity-color-redshift distributions from the GOODS survey. We also compare these results to those expected from a possible future spectroscopic survey such as BigBOSS.