The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: first measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2

Metin Ata , Falk Baumgarten , Julian Bautista , Florian Beutler , Dmitry Bizyaev , Michael R. Blanton , Jonathan A. Blazek , Adam S. Bolton , Jonathan Brinkmann , Joel R. Brownstein , Etienne Burtin (1) , Chia-Hsun Chuang , Johan Comparat , Kyle S. Dawson , Axel de la Macorra , Wei Du , Helion Du Mas Des Bourboux (1) , Daniel J. Eisenstein , Hector Gil-Marin (2, 3) , Katie Grabowski , Julien Guy (3) , Nick Hand , Shirley Ho , Timothy A. Hutchinson , Mikhail M. Ivanov , Francisco-Shu Kitaura , Jean-Paul Kneib (4) , Pierre Laurent (1) , Jean-Marc Le Goff (1) , Joseph E. Mcewen , Eva-Maria Mueller , Adam D. Myers , Jeffrey A. Newman , Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille (1) , Kaike Pan , Isabelle Paris (4) , Marcos Pellejero-Ibanez , Will J. Percival , Patrick Petitjean (5) , Francisco Prada , Abhishek Prakash , Sergio A. Rodríguez-Torres , Ashley J. Ross , Graziano Rossi , Rossana Ruggeri , Ariel G. Sanchez , Siddharth Satpathy , David J. Schlegel , Donald P. Schneider , Hee Jong Seo , Anze Slosar , Alina Streblyanska , Jeremy L. Tinker , Rita Tojeiro , Mariana Vargas Magana , M. Vivek , Yuting Wang , Christophe Yeche (1) , Liang Yu , Pauline Zarrouk (1) , Cheng Zhao , Gong-Bo Zhao , Fangzhou Zhu

1 IRFU - Institut de Recherches sur les lois Fondamentales de l'Univers
2 Institut Lagrange de Paris
3 LPNHE (UMR_7585) - Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies
4 LAM - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille
5 IAP - Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris

We present measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) scale in redshift-space using the clustering of quasars. We consider a sample of 147 000 quasars from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) distributed over 2044 square degrees with redshifts 0.8 < z < 2.2 and measure their spherically averaged clustering in both configuration and Fourier space. Our observational data set and the 1400 simulated realizations of the data setallow us to detect a preference for BAO that is greater than 2.8σ. We determine the spherically averaged BAO distance to z = 1.52 to 3.8 per cent precision: (z = 1.52) = 3843 ± 147(r_d/r_d, fid)Mpc. This is the first time the location of the BAO feature has been measured between redshifts 1 and 2. Our result is fully consistent with the prediction obtained by extrapolating the Planck flat ΛCDM best-fitting cosmology. All of our results are consistent with basic large-scale structure (LSS) theory, confirming quasars to be a reliable tracer of LSS, and provide a starting point for numerous cosmological tests to be performed with eBOSS quasar samples. We combine our result with previous, independent, BAO distance measurements to construct an updated BAO distance-ladder. Using these BAO data alone and marginalizing over the length of the standard ruler, we find Ω_Λ > 0 at 6.6σ significance when testing a ΛCDM model with free curvature.

Mots clés: dark energy; cosmology: observations; distance scale; large-scale structure of Universe

Domaines: Astrophysique [astro-ph]

Metin Ata, Falk Baumgarten, Julian Bautista, Florian Beutler, Dmitry Bizyaev, et al.. The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: first measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018, 473 (4), pp.4773-4794. ⟨10.1093/mnras/stx2630⟩. ⟨hal-01669710⟩