Efficient reconstruction of linear baryon acoustic oscillations in galaxy surveys

Abstract

Reconstructing an estimate of linear baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) from an evolved galaxy field has become a standard technique in recent analyses. By partially removing non-linear damping caused by bulk motions, the real-space BAO peak in the correlation function is sharpened, and oscillations in the power spectrum are visible to smaller scales. In turn these lead to stronger measurements of the BAO scale. Future surveys are being designed assuming that this improvement has been applied, and this technique is therefore of critical importance for future BAO measurements. A number of reconstruction techniques are available, but the most widely used is a simple algorithm that decorrelates large-scale and small-scale modes approximately removing the bulk-flow displacements by moving the overdensity field. We consider the practical implementation of this algorithm, looking at the efficiency of reconstruction as a function of the assumptions made for the bulk-flow scale, the shot-noise level in a random catalogue used to quantify the mask and the method used to estimate the bulk-flow shifts. We also examine the efficiency of reconstruction against external factors including galaxy density, volume and edge effects, and consider their impact for future surveys. Throughout we make use of the mocks catalogues created for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Date Release 11 samples covering 0.43 < z < 0.7 (CMASS) and 0.15 < z < 0.43 (LOWZ), to empirically test these changes.