The 3D power spectrum of galaxies from the SDSS

TL;DR

This paper measures the large-scale galaxy power spectrum from SDSS data, carefully correcting for systematics, and provides results useful for constraining cosmological parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a matrix-based method using pseudo-Karhunen-Loeve eigenmodes for precise power spectrum measurement from SDSS galaxy data.

Findings

Measured P(k) up to k=0.3h/Mpc with well-behaved window functions.

Found the bias factor is scale-independent to within a few percent for k<0.1h/Mpc.

Results are consistent with a flat scale-invariant cosmological model.

Abstract

We measure the large-scale real-space power spectrum P(k) using a sample of 205,443 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, covering 2417 square degrees with mean redshift z~0.1. We employ a matrix-based method using pseudo-Karhunen-Loeve eigenmodes, producing uncorrelated minimum-variance measurements in 22 k-bands of both the clustering power and its anisotropy due to redshift-space distortions, with narrow and well-behaved window functions in the range 0.02 h/Mpc < k < 0.3h/Mpc. We pay particular attention to modeling, quantifying and correcting for potential systematic errors, nonlinear redshift distortions and the artificial red-tilt caused by luminosity-dependent bias. Our final result is a measurement of the real-space matter power spectrum P(k) up to an unknown overall multiplicative bias factor. Our calculations suggest that this bias factor is independent of scale to better than a few percent for k<0.1h/Mpc, thereby making our results useful for precision measurements of cosmological parameters in conjunction with data from other experiments such as the WMAP satellite. As a simple characterization of the data, our measurements are well fit by a flat scale-invariant adiabatic cosmological model with h Omega_m =0.201+/- 0.017 and L* galaxy sigma_8=0.89 +/- 0.02 when fixing the baryon fraction Omega_b/Omega_m=0.17 and the Hubble parameter h=0.72; cosmological interpretation is given in a companion paper.