English

Mitigating the Impact of the DESI Fiber Assignment on Galaxy Clustering

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-03-03 v2

Abstract

We present a simple strategy to mitigate the impact of an incomplete spectroscopic redshift galaxy sample as a result of fiber assignment and survey tiling. The method has been designed for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) galaxy survey but may have applications beyond this. We propose a modification to the usual correlation function that nulls the almost purely angular modes affected by survey incompleteness due to fiber assignment. Predictions of this modified statistic can be calculated given a model of the two point correlation function. The new statistic can be computed with a slight modification to the data catalogues input to the standard correlation function code and does not incur any additional computational time. Finally we show that the spherically averaged baryon acoustic oscillation signal is not biased by the new statistic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.04635,
  title  = {Mitigating the Impact of the DESI Fiber Assignment on Galaxy Clustering},
  author = {Angela Burden and Nikhil Padmanabhan and Robert N. Cahn and Martin J. White and Lado Samushia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.04635},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

16 pages, 7 figures, 1 table