Precision cosmology with voids in the final BOSS data

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to extract cosmological parameters from cosmic voids in the BOSS DR12 dataset by analyzing distortions in void shapes, providing competitive constraints on matter density and growth rate.

Contribution

It introduces a physically motivated, model-independent approach to analyze voids, accounting for AP and RSD effects without prior assumptions, validated with mock catalogs.

Findings

Constraints on $f/b$ and $D_AH/c$ from voids are among the tightest to date.

Calibration improves parameter precision but depends on cosmological assumptions.

Results demonstrate the potential of voids for future cosmological studies.

Abstract

We report novel cosmological constraints obtained from cosmic voids in the final BOSS DR12 dataset. They arise from the joint analysis of geometric and dynamic distortions of average void shapes (i.e., the stacked void-galaxy cross-correlation function) in redshift space. Our model uses tomographic deprojection to infer real-space void profiles and self-consistently accounts for the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) effect and redshift-space distortions (RSD) without any prior assumptions on cosmology or structure formation. It is derived from first physical principles and provides an extremely good description of the data at linear perturbation order. We validate this model with the help of mock catalogs and apply it to the final BOSS data to constrain the RSD and AP parameters $f/b$ and $D_AH/c$, where $f$ is the linear growth rate, $b$ the linear galaxy bias, $D_A$ the comoving angular diameter distance, $H$ the Hubble rate, and $c$ the speed of light. In addition, we include two nuisance parameters in our analysis to marginalize over potential systematics. We obtain $f/b=0.540\pm0.091$ and $D_AH/c=0.588\pm0.004$ from the full void sample at a mean redshift of $z=0.51$. In a flat $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, this implies $\Omega_\mathrm{m}=0.312\pm0.020$ for the present-day matter density parameter. When we use additional information from the survey mocks to calibrate our model, these constraints improve to $f/b=0.347\pm0.023$, $D_AH/c=0.588\pm0.003$, and $\Omega_\mathrm{m}=0.310\pm0.017$. However, we emphasize that the calibration depends on the specific model of cosmology and structure formation assumed in the mocks, so the calibrated results should be considered less robust. Nevertheless, our calibration-independent constraints are among the tightest of their kind to date, demonstrating the immense potential of using cosmic voids for cosmology in current and future data.