Résumé / Abstract Journal-club_Univers

Séminaire Univers /
Seminar Universe

« Can the linear point clean-up the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations? »

Stefano Anselmi
Lab. Univers et Théories (LUTH), Obs. Paris-Meudon-Nancay (Meudon, France)

The acoustic peak in the large scale structure clustering correlation function has been known as a cosmological standard ruler. However, in the era of precision cosmology, its power has been highly challenged by late time non-linear effects that shift its position in a redshift dependent way. To overcome this problem currently the distance measurements based on Baryon Acoustic Oscillations rely on fixed-model-templates and reconstruction methods. However this is realized at the price of highly increasing the difficult-to-quantify theoretical priors that may overestimate the precision and accuracy of the distance estimates.
Fortunately this is not the end of the story! I will explain how we can evade non-linearities identifying a scale in the correlation function, called the “linear point”, that is an excellent cosmological standard ruler: it is constant in redshift and it is not affected by non-linear effects to within 0.5% percent precision. Hence we measure the location of the linear point in the galaxy correlation function in the Twelfth Data Release (DR12) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) collaboration. We estimate the isotropic-volume distance without relying on a model-template or reconstruction method. Our remarkable result suggests that all the distance information contained in the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations can be conveniently compressed into the single length associated with the linear point.
Last but not least, the correlation function amplitude at the linear point is similarly insensitive to non-linear corrections to within a few percent. Therefore, exploiting the particular Baryon features in the correlation function, we propose three new estimators for growth measurements.


mardi 30 janvier 2018 - 11:15
Salle 281
Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
Pages web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage