TY - JOUR
T1 - Signatures of the primordial Universe from its emptiness
T2 - measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from minima of the density field
AU - Kitaura, Francisco-Shu
AU - Chuang, Chia-Hsun
AU - Liang, Yu
AU - Zhao, Cheng
AU - Tao, Charling
AU - Rodríguez-Torres, Sergio
AU - Eisenstein, Daniel J.
AU - Gil-Marín, Héctor
AU - Kneib, Jean-Paul
AU - McBride, Cameron
AU - Percival, Will J.
AU - Ross, Ashley J.
AU - Sánchez, Ariel G.
AU - Tinker, Jeremy
AU - Tojeiro, Rita
AU - Vargas-Magana, Mariana
AU - Zhao, Gong-Bo
N1 - F. S. K. thanks the Leibniz Society for support. Y. L., C. T., and C. Z. acknowledge support from Tsinghua University through a 985 grant, 973 programme 2013CB834906, NSFC Grants No. 11033003 and No. 11173017, Sino French CNRS-CAS International Laboratories LIA Origins, and FCPPL. R. T. thanks the STFC for support. H. G. M. thanks the Labex ILP (Reference No. ANR-10-LABX-63), part of the Idex SUPER, for support, receiving financial state aid managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, as part of the programme Investissements d’avenir under Reference No. ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02. G. Z. is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Grant No. XDB09000000. The authors are also thankful for the access to computing facilities at Barcelona (MareNostrum), LRZ (Supermuc), AIP (erebos), CCIN2P3 (Quentin Le Boulc’h), and Tsinghua University. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
PY - 2016/4/29
Y1 - 2016/4/29
N2 - Sound waves from the primordial fluctuations of the Universe imprinted in the large-scale structure, called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), can be used as standard rulers to measure the scale of the Universe. These oscillations have already been detected in the distribution of galaxies. Here we propose to measure BAOs from the troughs (minima) of the density field. Based on two sets of accurate mock halo catalogues with and without BAOs in the seed initial conditions, we demonstrate that the BAO signal cannot be obtained from the clustering of classical disjoint voids, but it is clearly detected from overlapping voids. The latter represent an estimate of all troughs of the density field. We compute them from the empty circumsphere centers constrained by tetrahedra of galaxies using Delaunay triangulation. Our theoretical models based on an unprecedented large set of detailed simulated void catalogues are remarkably well confirmed by observational data. We use the largest recently publicly available sample of luminous red galaxies from SDSS-III BOSS DR11 to unveil for the first time a > 3σ BAO detection from voids in observations. Since voids are nearly isotropically expanding regions, their centers represent the most quiet places in the Universe, keeping in mind the cosmos origin and providing a new promising window in the analysis of the cosmological large-scale structure from galaxy surveys.
AB - Sound waves from the primordial fluctuations of the Universe imprinted in the large-scale structure, called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), can be used as standard rulers to measure the scale of the Universe. These oscillations have already been detected in the distribution of galaxies. Here we propose to measure BAOs from the troughs (minima) of the density field. Based on two sets of accurate mock halo catalogues with and without BAOs in the seed initial conditions, we demonstrate that the BAO signal cannot be obtained from the clustering of classical disjoint voids, but it is clearly detected from overlapping voids. The latter represent an estimate of all troughs of the density field. We compute them from the empty circumsphere centers constrained by tetrahedra of galaxies using Delaunay triangulation. Our theoretical models based on an unprecedented large set of detailed simulated void catalogues are remarkably well confirmed by observational data. We use the largest recently publicly available sample of luminous red galaxies from SDSS-III BOSS DR11 to unveil for the first time a > 3σ BAO detection from voids in observations. Since voids are nearly isotropically expanding regions, their centers represent the most quiet places in the Universe, keeping in mind the cosmos origin and providing a new promising window in the analysis of the cosmological large-scale structure from galaxy surveys.
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.171301
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.171301
M3 - Article
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 116
SP - 1
EP - 8
JO - Physical Review Letters
JF - Physical Review Letters
IS - 17
M1 - 171301
ER -