Citation:
Date Published:
August 1, 2007Abstract:
We present the cosmological distance errors achievable using thebaryonic acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler. We begin from aFisher matrix formalism that is upgraded from earlier Seo and Eisensteinwork. We isolate the information from the baryonic peaks by excludingdistance information from other less robust sources. Meanwhile, weaccommodate the Lagrangian displacement distribution into the Fishermatrix calculation to reflect the gradual loss of information in scaleand in time due to nonlinear growth, nonlinear bias, and nonlinearredshift distortions. We then show that we can contract themultidimensional Fisher matrix calculations into a two-dimensional oreven one-dimensional formalism with physically motivated approximations.We present the resulting fitting formula for the cosmological distanceerrors from galaxy redshift surveys as a function of survey parametersand nonlinearity, which saves us going through the 12 dimensional Fishermatrix calculations. Finally, we show excellent agreement between thedistance error estimates from the revised Fisher matrix and theprecision on the distance scale recovered from N-body simulations.