Abstract:

With the largest spectroscopic galaxy survey volume drawn from theSDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), we can extractcosmological constraints from the measurements of redshift and geometricdistortions at quasi-linear scales (e.g. above 50 Mpc/h), which can bemodeled by perturbation theory. We analyze the broad-range shape of themonopole and quadrupole correlation functions of the BOSS Data Release11 (DR11) CMASS galaxy sample, at the effective redshift z=0.57, toobtain constraints on the Hubble expansion rate H(z), theangular-diameter distance D_A(z), the normalized growth ratef(z)\sigma_8(z), and the physical matter density \Omega_mh^2. We provideaccurate measurements on {H^{-1}R_{fid}^{-1.0}, D_A R_{fid}^{-0.96},f\sigma_8(\Omega_m h^2)^{0.45}}, where R_{fid}\equiv r_s/r_{s,fid}, r_sis the comoving sound horizon at the drag epoch, and r_{s,fid} is thesound scale of the fiducial cosmology used in this study. We alsoextract cosmological constraints from BOSS DR11 LOWZ sample, at theeffective redshift z=0.32, by including small scales (e.g., down to 30Mpc/h), and model small scales with Finger of God effect. The parameterswhich are not well constrained by our galaxy clustering analysis aremarginalized over with wide flat priors. Since no priors from other datasets, e.g., cosmic microwave background (CMB), are adopted and no darkenergy models are assumed, our results from BOSS CMASS and LOWZ galaxyclustering alone may be combined with other data sets, i.e., CMB, SNe,lensing or other galaxy clustering data to constrain the parameters of agiven cosmological model. We find the redshift distortion measurementsfrom most of the galaxy clustering analyses (including this study) favorWMAP9 than Planck and favor wCDM than \LambdaCDM or o\LambdaCDM. Theuncertainty on the dark energy equation of state parameter fromCMB+CMASS is about 8 per cent.

Notes:

17 pages, 8 figures

Website