Cosmological constraints using BAO - From spectroscopic to photometric catalogues

  • Published : 2019.04.10

Abstract

Measurement of the location of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the clustering of galaxies has proven to be a robust and precise method to measure the expansion of the Universe. The best constraints so far have been provided from spectroscopic surveys because the errors on the redshift obtained from spectroscopy are minimal. This in turn means that the errors along the line-of-sight are reduced and so one can expect constraints on both angular diameter distance $D_A$ and expansion rate $H^{-1}$. But, future surveys will probe a larger part of the sky and go to deeper redshifts, which correspond to more number of galaxies. Analysing each galaxy using spectroscopy, which is a time consuming task, will not be practically possible. So, photometry will be the most convenient way to measure redshifts for future surveys such as LSST, Euclid, etc. The advantage of photometry is measuring the redshift of vast number of galaxies in a single exposure, but the disadvantage are the errors associated with the measured redshifts. Using a wedge approach, wherein the clustering is split into different wedges along the line-of-sight ${\pi}$ and across the line-of-sight ${\sigma}$, we show that the BAO information can be recovered even for photometric catalogues with errors along the line-of-sight. This means that we can get cosmological distance constraints even if we don't have spectroscopic information.

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