Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/42318

Title

Measuring the cosmic evolution of dark energy with baryonic oscillations in the galaxy power spectrum

Author(s)

Glazebrook, Karl;  Blake, Chris

Abstract

We use Monte Carlo techniques to simulate the ability of future large high-redshift galaxy surveys to measure the temporal evolution of the dark energy equation of state ω(z) , using the baryonic acoustic oscillations in the clustering power spectrum as a “standard ruler ”. Our analysis utilizes only the oscillatory component of the power spectrum and not its overall shape, which is potentially susceptible to broadband tilts induced by a host of model-dependent systematic effects. Our results are therefore robust and conservative. We show that baryon oscillation constraints can be thought of, to high accuracy, as a direct probe of the distance-redshift and expansion rate–redshift relations where distances are measured in units of the sound horizon. Distance precisions of 1% are obtainable for a fiducial redshift survey covering 10,000 deg2 and redshift range 0.5 < z < 3.5. If the dark energy is further characterized by ω(z) = ω 0 + ω 1 z (with a cutoff in the evolving term at x = 2 ), we can then measure the parameters ω 0 and ω 1 with a precision exceeding current knowledge by a factor of 10:1 σ accuracies Δ ω 0 ≈ 0.03 and Δ ω 1 ≈ 0.06 are obtainable (assuming a flat universe and that the other cosmological parameters Ω m and h could be measured independently to a precision of ±0.01 by combinations of future CMB and other experiments). We quantify how this performance degrades with redshift/areal coverage and knowledge of Ω m and h and discuss realistic observational prospects for such large-scale spectroscopic redshift surveys, with a variety of diverse techniques. We also quantify how large photometric redshift imaging surveys could be utilized to produce measurements of ω 0 ω 1 with the baryonic oscillation method, which may be competitive in the short term.

Publication type

Journal article

Source

Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 631, no. 1 (Sep 2005), pp. 1-20

Publication year

2005

Keyword(s)

Catalogs;  Catalogues;  Constraints;  Cosmological parameters;  Deep survey;  Field;  Large-scale structure;  Luminosity function;  Photometric redshifts;  Star-formation;  Supernovae;  Surveys;  Universe;  Telescope

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

ISSN

0004-637X

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/432497

Copyright

Copyright © 2005 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Peer reviewed