Citation:
Date Published:
August 1, 2010Abstract:
We introduce a new statistic ωell(rs ) formeasuring and analyzing large-scale structure and particularly thebaryon acoustic oscillations. ωell(rs ) is aband-filtered, configuration space statistic that is easily implementedand has advantages over the traditional power spectrum and correlationfunction estimators. Unlike these estimators,ωell(rs ) can localize most of the acousticinformation into a single dip at the acoustic scale while avoidingsensitivity to the poorly constrained large-scale power (i.e., theintegral constraint) through the use of a localized and compensatedfilter. It is also sensitive to anisotropic clustering through paircounting and does not require any binning of data. We measure the shiftin the acoustic peak due to nonlinear effects using the monopoleω0(rs ) derived from subsampled dark matter(DM) catalogs as well as from mock galaxy catalogs created via halooccupation distribution modeling. All of these are drawn from 44realizations of 10243 particle DM simulations in a 1 h-1 Gpc box at z = 1. We compare these shifts with thoseobtained from the power spectrum and conclude that the results agree. Wetherefore expect that distance measurements obtained fromω0(rs ) and P(k) will be consistent witheach other. We also show that it is possible to extract the same amountof acoustic information by fitting over a finite range using eitherω0(rs ) or P(k) derived from equal volumesurveys.