Theoretical Systematics of Future Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Surveys

ORAL

Abstract

Future Baryon Acoustic Oscillation surveys aim at observing galaxy clustering over a wide range of redshift and galaxy populations at great precision in order to detect any deviation of dark energy from the $\rm{\Lambda CDM}$ model. With the statistical error of such surveys reaching tenths of a percent, it is critical to control the BAO systematics below the level of $\sim 0.1\%$. We utilize a set of paired simulations that were designed to mitigate the sample variance effect on the BAO feature and evaluated the BAO systematics as precisely as $\sim 0.01\%$. We report anisotropic BAO scale shifts before and after density field reconstruction in the presence of redshift-space distortions over a wide range of redshift, galaxy/halo biases, and shot noise levels. We test different reconstruction schemes and different smoothing filter scales, and introduce physically-motivated BAO fitting models. We test these models from the perspective of robust BAO measurements and non-BAO information such as growth rate and nonlinear bias. We find that pre-reconstruction BAO scale has moderate fitting-model dependence at the level of $0.1\%-0.2\%$ for matter while the dependence is substantially reduced to less than $0.07\%$ for halos. We detail other systematics in the talk.

Authors

  • Zhejie Ding

    Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ohio University

  • Hee-Jong Seo

    Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ohio University

  • Zvonimir Vlah

    CERN

  • Yu Feng

    Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, University of California at Berkeley

  • Marcel Schmittfull

    Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton

  • Florian Beutler

    Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth