English

Low-redshift-agnostic BAO Constraints on Binned Dark-energy Density Evolution from DESI DR1 and DR2

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-04-09 v1

Abstract

We present a low-redshift-agnostic compression of anisotropic baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) distances to constrain the normalized dark-energy density evolution, X(z)ρDE(z)/ρDE(0)X(z)\equiv \rho_{\rm DE}(z)/\rho_{\rm DE}(0), above the lowest BAO redshift node z1z_1. Standard BAO summaries include the transverse comoving distance DM/rdD_{\rm M}/r_{\rm d}, which depends on the integral of H1(z)H^{-1}(z) from z=0z=0 to zz and therefore mixes the expansion history at z<z1z<z_1 with the higher-redshift signal. We instead replace the set DM(zi)/rdD_{\rm M}(z_i)/r_{\rm d} by adjacent increments ΔDM(zi,zi+1)/rd\Delta D_{\rm M}(z_i,z_{i+1})/r_{\rm d} while retaining the radial distances DH(zi)/rdD_{\rm H}(z_i)/r_{\rm d}. The mapping is linear, so the covariance propagates exactly. This compression intentionally removes one absolute transverse-distance mode, namely the additive contribution to DM/rdD_{\rm M}/r_{\rm d} below the first BAO node, and preserves the remaining information relevant to reconstructing the expansion history above z1z_1. Applied to DESI DR1 and DR2 anisotropic BAO measurements, the method yields almost uncorrelated constraints on piecewise-constant interval parameters XjX_j. In this sense, the compressed likelihood provides a conservative band-power-like estimate of dark-energy evolution: each interval is constrained mainly by BAO information from its own redshift range, while one nonlocal transverse mode and stronger global assumptions are deliberately projected out or marginalized over. Because our baseline analysis also marginalizes over bin-local matter-density and distance-scale parameters with broad external priors, the resulting XjX_j constraints should be interpreted as a low-redshift-agnostic BAO baseline rather than as a fully prior-free reconstruction. All bins are consistent with X=1X=1 within current uncertainties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.06888,
  title  = {Low-redshift-agnostic BAO Constraints on Binned Dark-energy Density Evolution from DESI DR1 and DR2},
  author = {Qian-Mo Liu and Gong-Bo Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06888},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 2 figures