BAO Extractor: bias and redshift space effects

Understand

We study a new procedure to measure the sound horizon scale via Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO).

• Instead of fitting the measured power spectrum (PS) to a theoretical model containing the cosmological informations and all the nonlinear effects, we define a procedure to project out (or to "extract") the oscillating component from a given nonlinear PS.
• We show that the BAO scale extracted in this way is extremely robust and, moreover, can be reproduced by simple theoretical models at any redshift.
• By using N-body simulations, we discuss the effect of the nonlinear evolution of the matter field, of redshift space distortions and of scale-dependent halo bias, showing that all these effects can be reproduced with sub-percent accuracy.