Dark Energy Constraints from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations

Abstract

Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the galaxy power spectrum allows us to extract the scale of the comoving sound horizon at recombination, a cosmological standard ruler accurately determined by the cosmic microwave background anisotropy data. We examine various issues important in the use of BAO to probe dark energy. We find that assuming a flat universe, and priors on Omega_m, Omega_m h^2, and Omega_b h^2 as expected from the Planck mission, the constraints on dark energy parameters (w_0,w') scale much less steeply with survey area than (area)^{-1/2} for a given redshift range. The constraints on the dark energy density rho_X(z), however, do scale roughly with (area)^{-1/2} due to the strong correlation between H(z) and Omega_m (which reduces the effect of priors on Omega_m). Dark energy constraints from BAO are very sensitive to the assumed linear scale of matter clustering and the redshift accuracy of the survey. For a BAO survey with 0.5