The environmental dependence of the baryon acoustic peak in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey CMASS sample

Understand

The environmental dependence of galaxy clustering encodes information about the physical processes governing the growth of cosmic structure.

• We analyze the baryon acoustic peak as a function of environment in the galaxy correlation function of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey CMASS sample.
• Dividing the sample into three subsets by smoothed local overdensity, we detect acoustic peaks in the six separate auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions of the sub-samples.
• Fitting models to these correlation functions, calibrated by mock galaxy and dark matter catalogues, we find that the inferred distance scale is independent of environment, and consistent with the result of analyzing the combined sample.