Optimal reconstruction of baryon acoustic oscillations for DESI 2024
E. Paillas, Z. Ding, Xinyi Chen, H. Seo, Nikhil Padmanabhan, Arnaud de Mattia, Ashley J. Ross, S. Nadathur, Cullan Howlett, José Edgar Madriz Aguilar, S. P. Ahlen, O. Alves, U. Andrade, D. Brooks, E. Buckley‐Geer, E. Burtin, S. Chen, T. Claybaugh, Shaun Cole, K. Dawson, Axel de la Macorra, Arjun Dey, P. Doel, K. Fanning, Simone Ferraro, J. E. Forero-Romero, C. García-Quintero, E. Gaztañaga, Héctor Gil-Marín, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, G. Gutierrez, ChangHoon Hahn, M. Hanif, Cullan Howlett, Mustapha Ishak, R. Kehoe, Anthony Kremin, M. Landriau, L. Le Guillou, M. E. Levi, Marc Manera, Paul Martini, L. Medina-Varela, Aaron Meisner, J. Mena-Fernández, R. Miquel, John Moustakas, E. Müeller, A. Muñoz-Gutiérrez, Adam D. Myers, J. A. Newman, J. Nie, Gustavo Niz, N. Palanque‐Delabrouille, Will J. Percival, Claire Poppett, F. Prada, A. Pérez-Fernández, M. Rashkovetskyi, Mehdi Rezaie, A. Rosado-Marin, G. Rossi, Rossana Ruggeri, E. Sanchez, Christoph Saulder, Edward F. Schlafly, D. Schlegel, M. Schubnell, David Sprayberry, G. Tarlé, D. Valcin, M. Vargas-Magaña, Jiaxi Yu, Sihan Yuan, Rongpu Zhou, Hu Zou
Abstract
Abstract Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) provide a robust standard ruler to measure the expansion history of the Universe through galaxy clustering. Density-field reconstruction is now a widely adopted procedure for increasing the precision and accuracy of the BAO detection. With the goal of finding the optimal reconstruction settings to be used in the DESI 2024 galaxy BAO analysis, we assess the sensitivity of the post-reconstruction BAO constraints to different choices in our analysis configuration, performing tests on blinded data from the first year of DESI observations (DR1), as well as on mocks that mimic the expected clustering and selection properties of the DESI DR1 target samples. Overall, we find that BAO constraints remain robust against multiple aspects in the reconstruction process, including the choice of smoothing scale, treatment of redshift-space distortions, fiber assignment incompleteness, and parameterizations of the BAO model. We also present a series of tests that DESI followed in order to assess the maturity of the end-to-end galaxy BAO pipeline before the unblinding of the large-scale structure catalogs.