Hunting down systematics in baryon acoustic oscillations after cosmic high noon

PRADA, FRANCISCO; SCOCCOLA, CLAUDIA GRACIELA; CHUANG, CHIA-HSUN; YEPES, GUSTAVO; KLYPIN, ANATOLY A.; KITAURA, FRANCISCO-SHU; GOTTLOBER, STEFAN; ZHAO, CHENG

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016 vol. 458 p. 613 - 623

0035-8711

Future dark energy experiments will require accurate theoreticalpredictions for the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). Here, we uselarge N-body simulations to study any systematic shifts and damping inBAO due to non-linear effects. The impact of cosmic variance is largelyreduced by dividing the tracer power spectrum by that from a `BAO-free'simulation starting with the same random amplitudes and phases. Theaccuracy of our simulations allows us to resolve well dark matter(sub)haloes, which permits us to study with high accuracy (better than0.02 per cent for dark matter and 0.07 per cent for low-bias haloes)small BAO shifts α towards larger k, and non-linear dampingΣnl of BAO in the power spectrum. For dark matter, weprovide an accurate parametrization of the evolution of α as afunction of the linear growth factor D(z). For halo samples, with biasfrom 1.2 to 2.8, we measure a typical BAO shift of ≈0.25 per cent,with no appreciable evolution with redshift. Moreover, we report aconstant shift as a function of halo bias. We find a different evolutionof the BAO damping in all halo samples as compared to dark matter withhaloes suffering less damping, and also find some weak dependence onbias. Larger BAO shift and damping are measured in redshift-space, whichcan be explained by linear theory due to redshift-space distortions. Aclear modulation in phase with the acoustic scale is observed in thescale-dependent halo bias due to the presence of BAOs. We compare ourresults with previous works.