English

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-06-05 v3

Abstract

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1208.0022,
  title  = {The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III},
  author = {Kyle S. Dawson and David J. Schlegel and Christopher P. Ahn and Scott F. Anderson and Éric Aubourg and Stephen Bailey and Robert H. Barkhouser and Julian E. Bautista and Alessandra Beifiori and Andreas A. Berlind and Vaishali Bhardwaj and Dmitry Bizyaev and Cullen H. Blake and Michael R. Blanton and Michael Blomqvist and Adam S. Bolton and Arnaud Borde and Jo Bovy and W. N. Brandt and Howard Brewington and Jon Brinkmann and Peter J. Brown and Joel R. Brownstein and Kevin Bundy and N. G. Busca and William Carithers and Aurelio R. Carnero and Michael A. Carr and Yanmei Chen and Johan Comparat and Natalia Connolly and Frances Cope and Rupert A. C. Croft and Antonio J. Cuesta and Luiz N. da Costa and James R. A. Davenport and Timothée Delubac and Roland de Putter and Saurav Dhital and Anne Ealet and Garrett L. Ebelke and Daniel J. Eisenstein and S. Escoffier and Xiaohui Fan and N. Filiz Ak and Hayley Finley and Andreu Font-Ribera and R. Génova-Santos and James E. Gunn and Hong Guo and Daryl Haggard and Patrick B. Hall and Jean-Christophe Hamilton and Ben Harris and David W. Harris and Shirley Ho and David W. Hogg and Diana Holder and Klaus Honscheid and Joe Huehnerhoff and Beatrice Jordan and Wendell P. Jordan and Guinevere Kauffmann and Eyal A. Kazin and David Kirkby and Mark A. Klaene and Jean-Paul Kneib and Jean-Marc Le Goff and Khee-Gan Lee and Daniel C. Long and Craig P. Loomis and Britt Lundgren and Robert H. Lupton and Marcio A. G. Maia and Martin Makler and Elena Malanushenko and Viktor Malanushenko and Rachel Mandelbaum and Marc Manera and Claudia Maraston and Daniel Margala and Karen L. Masters and Cameron K. McBride and Patrick McDonald and Ian D. McGreer and Richard McMahon and Olga Mena and Jordi Miralda-Escudé and Antonio D. Montero-Dorta and Francesco Montesano and Demitri Muna and Adam D. Myers and Tracy Naugle and Robert C. Nichol and Pasquier Noterdaeme and Sebastián E. Nuza and Matthew D. Olmstead and Audrey Oravetz and Daniel J. Oravetz and Russell Owen and Nikhil Padmanabhan and Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille and Kaike Pan and John K. Parejko and Isabelle Pâris and Will J. Percival and Ismael Pérez-Fournon and Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols and Patrick Petitjean and Robert Pfaffenberger and Janine Pforr and Matthew M. Pieri and Francisco Prada and Adrian M. Price-Whelan and M. Jordan Raddick and Rafael Rebolo and James Rich and Gordon T. Richards and Constance M. Rockosi and Natalie A. Roe and Ashley J. Ross and Nicholas P. Ross and Graziano Rossi and J. A. Rubiño-Martin and Lado Samushia and Ariel G. Sánchez and Conor Sayres and Sarah J. Schmidt and Donald P. Schneider and C. G. Scóccola and Hee-Jong Seo and Alaina Shelden and Erin Sheldon and Yue Shen and Yiping Shu and Anže Slosar and Stephen A. Smee and Stephanie A. Snedden and Fritz Stauffer and Oliver Steele and Michael A. Strauss and Alina Streblyanska and Nao Suzuki and Molly E. C. Swanson and Tomer Tal and Masayuki Tanaka and Daniel Thomas and Jeremy L. Tinker and Rita Tojeiro and Christy A. Tremonti and M. Vargas Magana and Licia Verde and Matteo Viel and David A. Wake and Mike Watson and Benjamin A. Weaver and David H. Weinberg and Benjamin J. Weiner and Andrew A. West and Martin White and W. M. Wood-Vasey and Christophe Yeche and Idit Zehavi and Gong-Bo Zhao and Zheng Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.0022},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by AJ