A 2 per cent distance to z = 0.35 by reconstructing baryon acoustic oscillations - I. Methods and application to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2012-12, Vol.427 (3), p.2132-2145
• Main Authors: Padmanabhan, Nikhil, Xu, Xiaoying, Eisenstein, Daniel J., Scalzo, Richard, Cuesta, Antonio J., Mehta, Kushal T., Kazin, Eyal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astrophysics; cosmological parameters; cosmology: observations; dark energy; distance scale; large‐scale structure of Universe; Scientific imaging; Stars & galaxies; Surface acoustic waves
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.21888.x

Abstract We present the first application to density field reconstruction to a galaxy survey to undo the smoothing of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature due to non-linear gravitational evolution and thereby improve the precision of the distance measurements possible. We apply the reconstruction technique to the clustering of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) luminous red galaxy (LRG) sample, sharpening the BAO feature and achieving a 1.9 per cent measurement of the distance to z = 0.35. We update the reconstruction algorithm of Eisenstein et al. to account for the effects of survey geometry as well as redshift-space distortions and validate it on 160 LasDamas simulations. We demonstrate that reconstruction sharpens the BAO feature in the angle averaged galaxy correlation function, reducing the non-linear smoothing scale Σnl from 8.1 to 4.4 Mpc h −1. Reconstruction also significantly reduces the effects of redshift-space distortions at the BAO scale, isotropizing the correlation function. This sharpened BAO feature yields an unbiased distance estimate (