Improving reconstruction of the baryon acoustic peak : the effect of local environment

Abstract

Precise measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale as a standard ruler in the clustering pattern of large-scale structure is a central goal of current and future galaxy surveys. The BAO peak may be sharpened using the technique of density-field reconstruction, in which the bulk displacements of galaxies are estimated using a Zel'dovitch approximation. We use numerical simulations to demonstrate how the accuracy of this approximation depends strongly on local environment, and how this information may be used to construct an improved BAO measurement through environmental re-weighting and using higher-order perturbation theory. We outline further applications of the displacement field for testing cosmological models.