Date Published:

January 1, 2017

Abstract:

We explore the cosmological implications of anisotropic clusteringmeasurements in configuration space of the final galaxy samples fromData Release 12 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Baryon OscillationSpectroscopic Survey. We implement a new detailed modelling of theeffects of non-linearities, bias and redshift-space distortions that canbe used to extract unbiased cosmological information from ourmeasurements for scales s ≳ 20 h^-1 Mpc. We combined theinformation from Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) with thelatest cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations and Type Iasupernovae samples and found no significant evidence for a deviationfrom the Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model. Inparticular, these data sets can constrain the dark energyequation-of-state parameter to w_DE = -0.996 ± 0.042when to be assumed time independent, the curvature of the Universe toΩ_k = -0.0007 ± 0.0030 and the sum of theneutrino masses to ∑m_ν < 0.25 eV at 95 per centconfidence levels. We explore the constraints on the growth rate ofcosmic structures assuming f(z) =Ω_m(z)^γ and obtain γ = 0.609± 0.079, in good agreement with the predictions of generalrelativity of γ = 0.55. We compress the information of ourclustering measurements into constraints on the parameter combinationsD_V(z)/r_d, F_AP(z) andfσ₈(z) at z_eff = 0.38, 0.51 and 0.61 withtheir respective covariance matrices and find good agreement with thepredictions for these parameters obtained from the best-fittingΛCDM model to the CMB data from the Planck satellite. This paperis part of a set that analyses the final galaxy clustering data set fromBOSS. The measurements and likelihoods presented here are combined withothers by Alam et al. to produce the final cosmological constraints fromBOSS.

Website