Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: measurement of the galaxy angular power spectrum. Issue 3 (3rd June 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Camacho, H; Kokron, N; Andrade-Oliveira, F; Rosenfeld, R; Lima, M; Lacasa, F; Sobreira, F; da Costa, L N; Avila, S; Chan, K C; Crocce, M; Ross, A J; Troja, A; García-Bellido, J; Abbott, T M C; Abdalla, F B; Allam, S; Annis, J; Bernstein, R A; Bertin, E; Bridle, S L; Brooks, D; Buckley-Geer, E; Burke, D L; Carnero Rosell, A; Carrasco Kind, M; Carretero, J; Castander, F J; Cawthon, R; Cunha, C E; D'Andrea, C B; De Vicente, J; Desai, S; Diehl, H T; Doel, P; Estrada, J; Evrard, A E; Flaugher, B; Fosalba, P; Frieman, J; Gerdes, D W; Giannantonio, T; Gruendl, R A; Gschwend, J; Gutierrez, G; Hollowood, D L; Honscheid, K; Hoyle, B; James, D J; Johnson, M W G; Johnson, M D; Kent, S; Kirk, D; Krause, E; Kuehn, K; Kuropatkin, N; Lin, H; Marshall, J L; Miquel, R; Percival, W J; Plazas, A A; Romer, A K; Roodman, A; Sanchez, E; Schubnell, M; Sevilla-Noarbe, I; Smith, M; Smith, R C; Soares-Santos, M; Suchyta, E; Swanson, M E C; Tarle, G; Thomas, D; Tucker, D L; Walker, A R; Zuntz, J;
• Is Part Of: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Volume 487:Issue 3(2019)
• Page Start: 3870
• Page End: 3883
• Publication Date: 2019-06-03
• Subjects: cosmology: observations -- large-scale structure of Universe; Astronomy -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 520.5
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz1514
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0035-8711

Abstract

ABSTRACT: We use data from the first-year observations of the DES collaboration to measure the galaxy angular power spectrum (APS), and search for its BAO feature. We test our methodology in a sample of 1800 DES Y1-like mock catalogues. We use the pseudo- C ℓ method to estimate the APS and the mock catalogues to estimate its covariance matrix. We use templates to model the measured spectra and estimate template parameters firstly from the C ℓ 's of the mocks using two different methods, a maximum likelihood estimator and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo, finding consistent results with a good reduced χ 2 . Robustness tests are performed to estimate the impact of different choices of settings used in our analysis. Finally, we apply our method to a galaxy sample constructed from DES Y1 data specifically for LSS studies. This catalogue comprises galaxies within an effective area of 1318 deg 2 and 0.6 < z < 1.0. We find that the DES Y1 data favour a model with BAO at the $2.6 \sigma$ C.L. However, the goodness of fit is somewhat poor, with χ 2 /(d.o.f.) = 1.49. We identify a possible cause showing that using a theoretical covariance matrix obtained from C ℓ 's that are better adjusted to data results in an improved value of χ 2 /(dof) = 1.36 which is similar to the value obtained with the real-space analysis. Our results correspond to a distance measurement of DA ( z eff = 0.81)/ rd = 10.65 ± 0.49, consistent with the main DES BAO findings. This is a companion paper to the main DES BAO article showing the details of the harmonic space analysis.