The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: Final data release and cosmological results

TL;DR

This paper reports the final cosmological results from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, analyzing galaxy power spectra across multiple redshifts, assessing theoretical models, and confirming consistency with the LambdaCDM cosmology when combined with other datasets.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of the WiggleZ survey data, testing various power spectrum models, and provides publicly available tools and data for further cosmological research.

Findings

Consistent with LambdaCDM when combined with CMB data.

Measured Omega_m = 0.29 +/- 0.016 and sigma_8 = 0.825 +/- 0.017.

No evidence for deviations in extension parameters from standard cosmology.

Abstract

This paper presents cosmological results from the final data release of the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey. We perform full analyses of different cosmological models using the WiggleZ power spectra measured at z=0.22, 0.41, 0.60, and 0.78, combined with other cosmological datasets. The limiting factor in this analysis is the theoretical modelling of the galaxy power spectrum, including non-linearities, galaxy bias, and redshift-space distortions. In this paper we assess several different methods for modelling the theoretical power spectrum, testing them against the Gigaparsec WiggleZ simulations (GiggleZ). We fit for a base set of 6 cosmological parameters, {Omega_b h^2, Omega_CDM h^2, H_0, tau, A_s, n_s}, and 5 supplementary parameters {n_run, r, w, Omega_k, sum m_nu}. In combination with the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), our results are consistent with the LambdaCDM concordance cosmology, with a measurement of the matter density of Omega_m =0.29 +/- 0.016 and amplitude of fluctuations sigma_8 = 0.825 +/- 0.017. Using WiggleZ data with CMB and other distance and matter power spectra data, we find no evidence for any of the extension parameters being inconsistent with their LambdaCDM model values. The power spectra data and theoretical modelling tools are available for use as a module for CosmoMC, which we here make publicly available at http://smp.uq.edu.au/wigglez-data . We also release the data and random catalogues used to construct the baryon acoustic oscillation correlation function.