Cosmic Voids in the SDSS DR12 BOSS Galaxy Sample: The Alcock-Paczynski Test

TL;DR

This study applies the Alcock-Paczynski test to cosmic voids in SDSS DR12 BOSS data, measuring the universe's matter density parameter with a novel approach that accounts for systematic uncertainties and compares results with mock catalogs.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to use stacked cosmic voids for the AP test in SDSS data, providing new constraints on cosmological parameters and analyzing systematic effects.

Findings

Measured void ellipticity with 2.6% precision

Obtained Omega_m = 0.38^{+0.18}_{-0.15} from AP test

Identified weaker-than-expected ellipticity scaling with cosmology

Abstract

We apply the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) test to the stacked voids identified using the large-scale structure galaxy catalog from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This galaxy catalog is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 12 and is the final catalog of SDSS-III. We also use 1000 mock galaxy catalogs that match the geometry, density, and clustering properties of the BOSS sample in order to characterize the statistical uncertainties of our measurements and take into account systematic errors such as redshift space distortions. For both BOSS data and mock catalogs, we use the ZOBOV algorithm to identify voids, we stack together all voids with effective radii of 30-100Mpc/h in the redshift range 0.43-0.7, and we accurately measure the shape of the stacked voids. Our tests with the mock catalogs show that we measure the stacked void ellipticity with a statistical precision of 2.6%. We find that the stacked voids in redshift space are slightly squashed along the line of sight, which is consistent with previous studies. We repeat this measurement of stacked void shape in the BOSS data assuming several values of Omega_m within the flat LCDM model, and we compare to the mock catalogs in redshift space in order to perform the AP test. We obtain a constraint of $\Omega_m = 0.38^{+0.18}_{-0.15}$ at the 68% confidence level from the AP test. We discuss the various sources of statistical and systematic noise that affect the constraining power of this method. In particular, we find that the measured ellipticity of stacked voids scales more weakly with cosmology than the standard AP prediction, leading to significantly weaker constraints. We discuss how AP constraints will improve in future surveys with larger volumes and densities.