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Reconstructing the baryon acoustic oscillations using biased tracers

Birkin, Jack; Li, Baojiu; Cautun, Marius; Shi, Yanlong

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Authors

Jack Birkin

Marius Cautun

Yanlong Shi



Abstract

The reconstruction of the initial conditions of the Universe is an important topic in cosmology, particularly in the context of sharpening the measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak. Nonlinear reconstruction algorithms developed in recent years, when applied to late-time matter fields, can recover to a substantial degree the initial density distribution, however, when applied to sparse tracers of the matter field, the performance is poorer. In this paper we apply the Shi et al. non-linear reconstruction method to biased tracers in order to establish what factors affect the reconstruction performance. We find that grid resolution, tracer number density and mass assignment scheme all have a significant impact on the performance of our reconstruction method, with triangular-shaped-cloud (TSC) mass assignment and a grid resolution of ∼1−2h −1 Mpc being the optimal choice. We also show that our method can be easily adapted to include generic tracer biases up to quadratic order in the reconstruction formalism. Applying the reconstruction to halo and galaxy samples with a range of tracer number densities, we find that the linear bias is by far the most important bias term, while including nonlocal and nonlinear biases only leads to marginal improvements on the reconstruction performance. Overall, including bias in the reconstruction substantially improves the recovery of BAO wiggles, down to k ∼ 0.25 hMpc−1 for tracer number densities between 2 × 10−4 and 2 × 10−3 (h −1Mpc) −3 .

Citation

Birkin, J., Li, B., Cautun, M., & Shi, Y. (2018). Reconstructing the baryon acoustic oscillations using biased tracers. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 483(4), 5267-5280. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty3365

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 4, 2018
Online Publication Date Dec 11, 2018
Publication Date Mar 11, 2018
Deposit Date Dec 11, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 483
Issue 4
Pages 5267-5280
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty3365
Related Public URLs https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08135

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2018 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.






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