The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: First measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2
Creators: name: Ata, Metin
name: Baumgarten, Falk
name: Bautista, Julian
name: Beutler, Florian
name: Bizyaev, Dmitry
name: Blanton, Michael R.
name: Blazek, Jonathan A.
name: Bolton, Adam S.
name: Brinkmann, Jonathan
name: Brownstein, Joel R.
name: Burtin, Etienne
name: Chuang, Chia-Hsun
name: Comparat, Johan
name: Dawson, Kyle S.
name: de la Macorra, Axel
name: Du, Wei
name: Bourboux, Helion du Mas des
name: Eisenstein, Daniel J.
name: Gil-Marin, Hector
name: Grabowski, Katie
name: Guy, Julien
name: Hand, Nick
name: Ho, Shirley
name: Hutchinson, Timothy A.
name: Ivanov, Mikhail M.
name: Kitaura, Francisco-Shu
name: Kneib, Jean-Paul
name: Laurent, Pierre
name: Goff, Jean-Marc Le
name: McEwen, Joseph E.
name: Mueller, Eva-Maria
name: Myers, Adam D.
name: Newman, Jeffrey A.
name: Palanque-Delabrouille, Nathalie
name: Pan, Kaike
name: Paris, Isabelle
name: Pellejero-Ibanez, Marcos
name: Percival, Will J.
name: Petitjean, Patrick
name: Prada, Francisco
name: Prakash, Abhishek
name: Rodriguez-Torres, Sergio A.
name: Ross, Ashley J.
name: Rossi, Graziano
name: Ruggeri, Rossana
name: Sanchez, Ariel G.
name: Satpathy, Siddharth
name: Schlegel, David J.
name: Schneider, Donald P.
name: Seo, Hee-Jong
name: Slosar, Anze
name: Streblyanska, Alina
name: Tinker, Jeremy L.
name: Tojeiro, Rita
name: Magana, Mariana Vargas
name: Vivek, M.
name: Wang, Yuting
name: Yeche, Christophe
name: Yu, Liang
name: Zarrouk, Pauline
name: Zhao, Cheng
name: Zhao, Gong-Bo
name: Zhu, Fangzhou
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We present measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) scale in redshift-space using the clustering of quasars. We consider a sample of 147,000 quasars from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) distributed over 2044 square degrees with redshifts $0.8 &lt; z &lt; 2.2$ and measure their spherically-averaged clustering in both configuration and Fourier space. Our observational dataset and the 1400 simulated realizations of the dataset allow us to detect a preference for BAO that is greater than 2.8$σ$. We determine the spherically averaged BAO distance to $z = 1.52$ to 3.8 per cent precision: $D_V(z=1.52)=3843\pm147 \left(r_{\rm d}/r_{\rm d, fid}\right)\ $Mpc. This is the first time the location of the BAO feature has been measured between redshifts 1 and 2. Our result is fully consistent with the prediction obtained by extrapolating the Planck flat $Λ$CDM best-fit cosmology. All of our results are consistent with basic large-scale structure (LSS) theory, confirming quasars to be a reliable tracer of LSS, and provide a starting point for numerous cosmological tests to be performed with eBOSS quasar samples. We combine our result with previous, independent, BAO distance measurements to construct an updated BAO distance-ladder. Using these BAO data alone and marginalizing over the length of the standard ruler, we find $Ω_Λ &gt; 0$ at 6.6$σ$ significance when testing a $Λ$CDM model with free curvature.
description: Accepted by MNRAS; BAO distance likelihood available in source files 'QSOv1.9fEZmock_BAOchi2.dat'; full set of data to be public eventually from SDSS website