We present measurements of galaxy clustering from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS‐III). These use the Data Release 9 (DR9) CMASS sample, which contains 264 283 massive galaxies covering 3275 square degrees with an effective redshift z = 0.57 and redshift range 0.43 < z < 0.7. Assuming a concordance ΛCDM cosmological model, this sample covers an effective volume of 2.2 Gpc3, and represents the largest sample of the Universe ever surveyed at this density, n¯≈3×10−4h−3 Mpc 3. We measure the angle‐averaged galaxy correlation function and power spectrum, including density‐field reconstruction of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of 5σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Combining with the SDSS‐II luminous red galaxy sample, the detection significance increases to 6.7σ. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance to z = 0.57 relative to the sound horizon DV/rs = 13.67 ± 0.22 at z = 0.57. Assuming a fiducial sound horizon of 153.19 Mpc, which matches cosmic microwave background constraints, this corresponds to a distance DV (z = 0.57) = 2094 ± 34 Mpc. At 1.7 per cent, this is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. We place this result alongside previous BAO measurements in a cosmological distance ladder and find excellent agreement with the current supernova measurements. We use these distance measurements to constrain various cosmological models, finding continuing support for a flat Universe with a cosmological constant.

We present the first application to density field reconstruction to a galaxy survey to undo the smoothing of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature due to non-linear gravitational evolution and thereby improve the precision of the distance measurements possible. We apply the reconstruction technique to the clustering of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) luminous red galaxy (LRG) sample, sharpening the BAO feature and achieving a 1.9 per cent measurement of the distance to z = 0.35. We update the reconstruction algorithm of Eisenstein et al. to account for the effects of survey geometry as well as redshift-space distortions and validate it on 160 LasDamas simulations. We demonstrate that reconstruction sharpens the BAO feature in the angle averaged galaxy correlation function, reducing the non-linear smoothing scale nl from 8.1 to 4.4 Mpc h −1 . Reconstruction also significantly reduces the effects of redshift-space distortions at the BAO scale, isotropizing the correlation function. This sharpened BAO feature yields an unbiased distance estimate (<0.2 per cent) and reduces the scatter from 3.3 to 2.1 per cent. We demonstrate the robustness of these results to the various reconstruction parameters, including the smoothing scale, the galaxy bias and the linear growth rate. Applying this reconstruction algorithm to the SDSS LRG DR7 sample improves the significance of the BAO feature in these data from 3.3σ for the unreconstructed correlation function to 4.2σ after reconstruction. We estimate a relative distance scale D V /r s to z = 0.35 of 8.88 ± 0.17, where r s is the sound horizon and D V ≡ (D 2 A H −1 ) 1/3 is a combination of the angular diameter distance D A and Hubble parameter H. Assuming a sound horizon of 154.25 Mpc, this translates into a distance measurement D V (z = 0.35) = 1.356 ± 0.025 Gpc. We find that reconstruction reduces the distance error in the DR7 sample from 3.5 to 1.9 per cent, equivalent to a survey with three times the volume of SDSS.

We report a detection of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the three-dimensional correlation function of the transmitted flux fraction in the Lyα forest of high-redshift quasars. The study uses 48 640 quasars in the redshift range 2.1 ≤ z ≤ 3.5 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the third generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III). At a mean redshift z = 2.3, we measure the monopole and quadrupole components of the correlation function for separations in the range 20 h −1 Mpc < r < 200 h −1 Mpc. A peak in the correlation function is seen at a separation equal to (1.01 ± 0.03) times the distance expected for the BAO peak within a concordance ΛCDM cosmology. This first detection of the BAO peak at high redshift, when the universe was strongly matter dominated, results in constraints on the angular diameter distance D A and the expansion rate H at z = 2.3 that, combined with priors on H 0 and the baryon density, require the existence of dark energy. Combined with constraints derived from cosmic microwave background observations, this result implies H(z = 2.3) = (224 ± 8) km s −1 Mpc −1 , indicating that the time derivative of the cosmological scale parameterȧ = H(z = 2.3)/(1 + z) is significantly greater than that measured with BAO at z ∼ 0.5. This demonstrates that the expansion was decelerating in the range 0.7 < z < 2.3, as expected from the matter domination during this epoch. Combined with measurements of H 0 , one sees the pattern of deceleration followed by acceleration characteristic of a dark-energy dominated universe.Key words. cosmology: observations -dark energy -large-scale structure of Universe -cosmological parameters Appendices are available in electronic form at

We measure shifts of the acoustic scale due to nonlinear growth and redshift distortions to a high precision using a very large volume of high-force-resolution simulations. We compare results from various sets of simulations that differ in their force, volume, and mass resolution. We find a consistency within 1.5 − σ for shift values from different simulations and derive shift α(z) − 1 = (0.300 ± 0.015)%[D(z)/D(0)] 2 using our fiducial set. We find a strong correlation with a non-unity slope between shifts in real space and in redshift space and a weak correlation between the initial redshift and low redshift. Density-field reconstruction not only removes the mean shifts and reduces errors on the mean, but also tightens the correlations. After reconstruction, we recover a slope of near unity for the correlation between the real and redshift space and restore a strong correlation between the initial and the low redshifts. We derive propagators and mode-coupling terms from our N-body simulations and compare with the Zel'dovich approximation and the shifts measured from the χ 2 fitting, respectively. We interpret the propagator and the mode-coupling term of a nonlinear density field in the context of an average and a dispersion of its complex Fourier coefficients relative to those of the linear density field; from these two terms, we derive a signal-to-noise ratio of the acoustic peak measurement. We attempt to improve our reconstruction method by implementing 2LPT and iterative operations, but we obtain little improvement. The Fisher matrix estimates of uncertainty in the acoustic scale is tested using 5000h −3 Gpc 3 of cosmological PM simulations from Takahashi et al. (2009a). At an expected sample variance level of 1%, the agreement between the Fisher matrix estimates based on and the N-body results is better than 10 %. Subject headings: distance scale-large-scale structure of universe -methods: numerical

We present results from fitting the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal in the correlation function obtained from the first application of density-field reconstruction to a galaxy redshift survey, namely the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) luminous red galaxy (LRG) catalogue. Reconstruction works to partially remove the effects of non-linear structure growth on the BAO by reconstructing the linear matter density field from the observed galaxy density field using the continuity equation. We also introduce more careful approaches for deriving a suitable covariance matrix and fitting model for galaxy correlation functions. Our covariance matrix technique guarantees smooth diagonal and off-diagonal terms by fitting a modified Gaussian covariance matrix to that calculated from mock catalogues. Our proposed fitting model is effective at removing broad-band effects such as redshift-space distortions, scale-dependent bias and any artefacts introduced by assuming the wrong model cosmology. These all aid in obtaining a more accurate measurement of the acoustic scale and its error. We validate these techniques on 160 mock catalogues derived from the LasDamas simulations in real and redshift space. We then apply these techniques to the DR7 LRG sample and find that the error on the acoustic scale decreases from ∼3.5 per cent before reconstruction to ∼1.9 per cent after reconstruction. We also see an increase in our BAO detection confidence from ∼3σ to ∼4σ after reconstruction with our confidence level in measuring the correct acoustic scale increasing from ∼3σ to ∼5σ . Using the mean of the acoustic scale probability distributions produced from our fits, we find D v /r s = 8.89 ± 0.31 before reconstruction and 8.88 ± 0.17 after reconstruction.