Date Published:

January 1, 2017

Abstract:

We present baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale measurementsdetermined from the clustering of 1.2 million massive galaxies withredshifts 0.2 < z < 0.75 distributed over 9300 deg², asquantified by their redshift-space correlation function. In order tofacilitate these measurements, we define, describe, and motivate theselection function for galaxies in the final data release (DR12) of theSDSS III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This includesthe observational footprint, masks for image quality and Galacticextinction, and weights to account for density relationships intrinsicto the imaging and spectroscopic portions of the survey. We simulate theobserved systematic trends in mock galaxy samples and demonstrate thatthey impart no bias on BAO scale measurements and have a minor impact onthe recovered statistical uncertainty. We measure transverse and radialBAO distance measurements in 0.2 < z < 0.5, 0.5 < z < 0.75,and (overlapping) 0.4 < z < 0.6 redshift bins. In each redshiftbin, we obtain a precision that is 2.7 per cent or better on the radialdistance and 1.6 per cent or better on the transverse distance. Thecombination of the redshift bins represents 1.8 per cent precision onthe radial distance and 1.1 per cent precision on the transversedistance. This paper is part of a set that analyses the final galaxyclustering data set from BOSS. The measurements and likelihoodspresented here are combined with others in Alam et al. to produce thefinal cosmological constraints from BOSS.

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