How does non-linear dynamics affect the baryon acoustic oscillation?

Naonori S. Sugiyama, David N. Spergel

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

27 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the non-linear behavior of the baryon acoustic oscillation in the power spectrum and the correlation function by decomposing the dark matter perturbations into the short- and long-wavelength modes. The evolution of the dark matter fluctuations can be described as a global coordinate transformation caused by the long-wavelength displacement vector acting on short-wavelength matter perturbation undergoing non-linear growth. Using this feature, we investigate the well known cancellation of the high-k solutions in the standard perturbation theory. While the standard perturbation theory naturally satisfies the cancellation of the high-k solutions, some of the recently proposed improved perturbation theories do not guarantee the cancellation. We show that this cancellation clarifies the success of the standard perturbation theory at the 2-loop order in describing the amplitude of the non-linear power spectrum even at high-k regions. We propose an extension of the standard 2-loop level perturbation theory model of the non-linear power spectrum that more accurately models the non-linear evolution of the baryon acoustic oscillation than the standard perturbation theory. The model consists of simple and intuitive parts: the non-linear evolution of the smoothed power spectrum without the baryon acoustic oscillations and the non-linear evolution of the baryon acoustic oscillations due to the large-scale velocity of dark matter and due to the gravitational attraction between dark matter particles. Our extended model predicts the smoothing parameter of the baryon acoustic oscillation peak at z = 0.35 as ∼ 7.7Mpc/h and describes the small non-linear shift in the peak position due to the galaxy random motions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number042
JournalJournal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume2014
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2014

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics

Keywords

  • baryon acoustic oscillations
  • power spectrum

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