Measuring D_A and H at z=0.35 from the SDSS DR7 LRGs using baryon acoustic oscillations

TL;DR

This paper measures the angular diameter distance and Hubble parameter at redshift 0.35 using anisotropic BAO signals in SDSS DR7 LRG data, applying density-field reconstruction to improve accuracy.

Contribution

First application of density-field reconstruction to anisotropic BAO analysis, providing more precise measurements of D_A and H at z=0.35.

Findings

Measured D_A(z=0.35)=1050±38 Mpc

Measured H(z=0.35)=84.4±7.0 km/s/Mpc

Reconstruction improved measurement precision by 20-40%

Abstract

We present measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A(z) and the Hubble parameter H(z) at z=0.35 using the anisotropy of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal measured in the galaxy clustering distribution of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) sample. Our work is the first to apply density-field reconstruction to an anisotropic analysis of the acoustic peak. Reconstruction partially removes the effects of non-linear evolution and redshift-space distortions in order to sharpen the acoustic signal. We present the theoretical framework behind the anisotropic BAO signal and give a detailed account of the fitting model we use to extract this signal from the data. Our method focuses only on the acoustic peak anisotropy, rather than the more model-dependent anisotropic information from the broadband power. We test the robustness of our analysis methods on 160 LasDamas DR7 mock catalogues and find that our models are unbiased at the ~0.2% level in measuring the BAO anisotropy. After reconstruction we measure D_A(z=0.35)=1050+/-38 Mpc and H(z=0.35)=84.4+/-7.0 km/s/Mpc assuming a sound horizon of r_s=152.76 Mpc. Note that these measurements are correlated with a correlation coefficient of 0.58. This represents a factor of 1.4 improvement in the error on D_A relative to the pre-reconstruction case; a factor of 1.2 improvement is seen for H.