DESI 2024 III: baryon acoustic oscillations from galaxies and quasars
A. G. Adame, J. Aguilar, S. P. Ahlen, Shadab Alam, D. M. Alexander, Marcelo A. Alvarez, O. Alves, Abhijeet Anand, U. Andrade, E. Armengaud, S. Àvila, Alejandro Avilés, Humna Awan, S. Bailey, C. Baltay, A. Bault, Jayashree Behera, S. BenZvi, Florian Beutler, D. Bianchi, Chris Blake, Robert Blum, S. Brieden, A. Brodzeller, D. Brooks, E. Buckley-Geer, E. Burtin, R. Calderón, R. E. A. Canning, A. Carnero Rosell, R. Cereskaite, Jorge L. Cervantes–Cota, Solène Chabanier, E. Chaussidon, J. Chaves-Montero, Shi-Fan Chen, Xinyi Chen, T. Claybaugh, Shaun Cole, Andrei Cuceu, T. M. Davis, Kyle Dawson, Axel de la Macorra, Arnaud de Mattia, N. Deiosso, Arjun Dey, Biprateep Dey, Z. Ding, P. Doel, Jerry Edelstein, S. Eftekharzadeh, Daniel J. Eisenstein, Ann Elliott, Parker Fagrelius, K. Fanning, Simone Ferraro, J. Ereza, N. Findlay, B. Flaugher, Andreu Font-Ribera, D. Forero-Sánchez, J. E. Forero-Romero, C. García-Quintero, E. Gaztañaga, Héctor Gil-Marín, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, Alma X. González‐Morales, Violeta González-Pérez, C. Gordon, D. Green, D. Gruen, Rafaela Gsponer, G. Gutierrez, J. Guy, Boryana Hadzhiyska, ChangHoon Hahn, M. Hanif, H. K. Herrera-Alcantar, K. Honscheid, Cullan Howlett, Dragan Huterer, Vid Iršič, Mustapha Ishak, S. Juneau, Naim Göksel Karaçaylı, R. Kehoe, S. Kent, D. Kirkby, Hui Kong, Anthony Kremin, Alex Krolewski, Ying‐Cheng Lai, Ting-Wen Lan, Martin Landriau, Dustin Lang, J. Lasker, J.M. Le Goff, L. Le Guillou, Alexie Leauthaud, M. E. Levi
Abstract
Abstract We present the DESI 2024 galaxy and quasar baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) measurements using over 5.7 million unique galaxy and quasar redshifts in the range 0.1 < z < 2.1. Divided by tracer type, we utilize 300,017 galaxies from the magnitude-limited Bright Galaxy Survey with 0.1 < z < 0.4, 2,138,600 Luminous Red Galaxies with 0.4 < z < 1.1, 2,432,022 Emission Line Galaxies with 0.8 < z < 1.6, and 856,652 quasars with 0.8 < z < 2.1, over a ∼ 7,500 square degree footprint. The analysis was blinded at the catalog-level to avoid confirmation bias. All fiducial choices of the BAO fitting and reconstruction methodology, as well as the size of the systematic errors, were determined on the basis of the tests with mock catalogs and the blinded data catalogs. We present several improvements to the BAO analysis pipeline, including enhancing the BAO fitting and reconstruction methods in a more physically-motivated direction, and also present results using combinations of tracers. We employ a unified BAO analysis method across all tracers. We present a re-analysis of SDSS BOSS and eBOSS results applying the improved DESI methodology and find scatter consistent with the level of the quoted SDSS theoretical systematic uncertainties. With the total effective survey volume of ∼ 18 Gpc 3 , the combined precision of the BAO measurements across the six different redshift bins is ∼0.52%, marking a 1.2-fold improvement over the previous state-of-the-art results using only first-year data. We detect the BAO in all of these six redshift bins. The highest significance of BAO detection is 9.1σ at the effective redshift of 0.93, with a constraint of 0.86% placed on the BAO scale. We find that our observed BAO scales are systematically larger than the prediction of the Planck 2018-ΛCDM at z < 0.8. We translate the results into transverse comoving distance and radial Hubble distance measurements, which are used to constrain cosmological models in our companion paper.