Precise Measurement of the Radial Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Scales in Galaxy Redshift Surveys

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, robust method to measure the radial Baryon Acoustic Oscillation scale in galaxy surveys, enabling precise, unbiased cosmological parameter estimation, especially for dark energy properties.

Contribution

It presents an empirical, cosmology-independent approach to extract the BAO scale from galaxy surveys, validated with simulations and limited only by cosmic variance.

Findings

Method provides robust, precise measurement of the sound horizon scale.

Radial and angular BAO measurements are highly sensitive to cosmological parameters.

Constraints on dark energy properties are significantly improved using this method.

Abstract

In this paper we present a new method to extract cosmological parameters using the radial scale of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations as a standard ruler in deep galaxy surveys. The method consists in an empirical parametrization of the radial 2-point correlation function, which provides a robust and precise extraction of the sound horizon scale. Moreover, it uses data from galaxy surveys in a manner that is fully cosmology independent and therefore, unbiased. A study of the main systematic errors and the validation of the method in cosmological simulations are also presented, showing that the measurement is limited only by cosmic variance. We then study the full information contained in the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, obtaining that the combination of the radial and angular determinations of this scale is a very sensitive probe of cosmological parameters, able to set strong constraints on the dark energy properties, even without combining it with any other probe.