| Optimizing baryon acoustic oscillation surveys II: curvature, redshifts, and external datasets (2009) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| We extend our study of the optimization of large baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) surveys to return the best constraints on the dark energy, building on Paper I of this series (Parkinson et al. 2007). The survey galaxies are assumed to be pre-selected active, star-forming galaxies observed by their line emission with a constant number density across the redshift bin. Star-forming galaxies have a redshift desert in the region 1.6 < z < 2, and so this redshift range was excluded from the analysis. We use the Seo & Eisenstein (2007) fitting formula for the accuracies of the BAO measurements, using only the information for the oscillatory part of the power spectrum as distance and expansion rate rulers. We go beyond our earlier analysis by examining the effect of including curvature on the optimal survey configuration and updating the expected `prior' constraints from Planck and SDSS. We once again find that the optimal survey strategy involves minimizing the exposure time and maximizing the survey area (within the instrumental constraints), and that all time should be spent observing in the low-redshift range (z2. We find that when assuming a flat universe the optimal survey makes measurements in the redshift range 0.1 < z . Comment: 15 pages, revised in response to referees remarks, accepted for publication in MNRAS. 2nd paper in a series. Paper 1 is at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0702040 | |||||||||
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