The clustering of Galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey : including covariance matrix errors
Abstract
We present improved methodology for including covariance matrices in the error budget of Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) galaxy clustering measurements, revisiting Data Release 9 (DR9) analyses, and describing a method that is used in DR10/11 analyses presented in companion papers. The precise analysis method adopted is becoming increasingly important, due to the precision that BOSS can now reach: even using as many as 600 mock catalogues to estimate covariance of two-point clustering measurements can still lead to an increase in the errors of ∼20 per cent, depending on how the cosmological parameters of interest are measured. In this paper, we extend previous work on this contribution to the error budget, deriving formulae for errors measured by integrating over the likelihood, and to the distribution of recovered best-fitting parameters fitting the simulations also used to estimate the covariance matrix. Both are situations that previous analyses of BOSS have considered. We apply the formulae derived to baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements from BOSS in our companion papers. To further aid these analyses, we consider the optimum number of bins to use for two-point measurements using the monopole power spectrum or correlation function for BAO, and the monopole and quadrupole moments of the correlation function for anisotropic-BAO and RSD measurements.
Citation
Percival , W J , Ross , A J , Sánchez , A G , Samushia , L , Burden , A , Crittenden , R , Cuesta , A J , Magana , M V , Manera , M , Beutler , F , Chuang , C-H , Eisenstein , D J , Ho , S , McBride , C K , Montesano , F , Padmanabhan , N , Reid , B , Saito , S , Schneider , D P , Seo , H-J , Tojeiro , R & Weaver , B A 2014 , ' The clustering of Galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey : including covariance matrix errors ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , vol. 439 , no. 3 , pp. 2531-2541 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu112
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-8711Type
Journal article
Rights
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2014 The Authors, Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
Description
JP acknowledges support from the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) through the consolidated grant ST/K0090X/1 and from the European Research Council through the ‘Starting Independent Research’ grant 202686, MDEPUGS. AGS acknowledges support from the Trans-regional Collaborative Research Centre TR33 ‘The Dark Universe’ of the German Research Foundation (DFG).Collections
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