Testing standard cosmology with large-scale structure

Abstract

The galaxy power spectrum contains information on the growth of structure, the growth rate through redshift space distortions and the cosmic expansion through baryon acoustic oscillation features. We study the ability of two proposed experiments, BigBOSS and JDEM-PS, to test the cosmological model and general relativity. We quantify the latter result in terms of the gravitational growth index γ, whose value in general relativity is γ ≈ 0.55. Significant deviations from this value could indicate new physics beyond the standard model of cosmology. The results show that BigBOSS (JDEM-PS) would be capable of measuring γ with an uncertainty σ(γ) = 0.043 (0.054), which tightens to σ(γ) = 0.031 (0.038) if we include Stage III data priors, marginalizing over neutrino mass, time-varying dark energy equation of state, and other parameters. For all dark energy parameters and related figures of merit, the two experiments give comparable results. We also carry out some studies of the influence of redshift range, resolution, treatment of non-linearities and bias evolution to enable further improvement. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation. © 2010 RAS.