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research article

Baryon acoustic oscillations in the Lya forest of BOSS DR11 quasars

Delubac, Timothee  
•
Bautista, Julian E.
•
Busca, Nicola G.
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2015
Astronomy & Astrophysics

We report a detection of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the flux-correlation function of the Ly alpha forest of high-redshift quasars with a statistical significance of five standard deviations. The study uses 137 562 quasars in the redshift range 2.1 <= z <= 3.5 from the data release 11 (DR11) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of SDSS-III. This sample contains three times the number of quasars used in previous studies. The measured position of the BAO peak determines the angular distance, D-A(Z = 2.34) and expansion rate, H(z = 2.34), both on a scale set by the sound horizon at the drag epoch, r(d). We find D-A/r(d) = 11.28 +/- 0.65(1 sigma)(-1.2)(+2.8)(2 sigma) and D-H/r(d) = 9.18 +/- 0.28(1 sigma) +/- 0.6(2 sigma) where D-H = c/H. The optimal combination, similar to(DHDA0.3)-D-0.7/r(d) is determined with a precision of similar to 2%. For the value r(d) = 147.4 Mpc, consistent with the cosmic microwave background power spectrum measured by Planck, we find D-A(Z = 2.34) = 1662 +/- 96(1 sigma) Mpc and H(z = 2.34) = 222 +/- 7(1 sigma) km s(-1) Mpc(-1). Tests with mock catalogs and variations of our analysis procedure have revealed no systematic uncertainties comparable to our statistical errors. Our results agree with the previously reported BAO measurement at the same redshift using the quasar-Ly alpha forest cross-correlation. The autocorrelation and cross-correlation approaches are complementary because of the quite different impact of redshift-space distortion on the two measurements. The combined constraints from the two correlation functions imply values of D-A/r(d) that are 7% lower and 7% higher for D-H/r(d) than the predictions of a flat ACDM cosmological model with the best-fit Planck parameters. With our estimated statistical errors, the significance of this discrepancy is approximate to 2.5 sigma.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1051/0004-6361/201423969
Web of Science ID

WOS:000349467000059

Author(s)
Delubac, Timothee  
Bautista, Julian E.
Busca, Nicola G.
Rich, James
Kirkby, David
Bailey, Stephen
Font-Ribera, Andreu
Slosar, Anze
Lee, Khee-Gan
Pieri, Matthew M.
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Date Issued

2015

Publisher

EDP Sciences

Published in
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Volume

574

Start page

A59

Subjects

cosmology: observations

•

dark energy

•

large-scale structure of Universe

•

cosmological parameters

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LASTRO  
Available on Infoscience
April 13, 2015
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/113256
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