The correlation function and detection of baryon acoustic oscillation peak from the spectroscopic SDSS-GalWCat galaxy cluster catalogue

Abstract

ABSTRACT We measure the two-point correlation function (CF) of 1357 galaxy clusters with a mass of log10M200 ≥ 13.6 h−1 M⊙ and at a redshift of z ≤ 0.125. This work differs from previous analyses in that it utilizes a spectroscopic cluster catalogue, $\tt {SDSS-GalWCat}$, to measure the CF and detect the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal. Unlike previous studies which use statistical techniques, we compute covariance errors directly by generating a set of 1086 galaxy cluster light-cones from the GLAM N-body simulation. Fitting the CF with a power-law model of the form ξ(s) = (s/s0)−γ, we determine the best-fitting correlation length and power-law index at three mass thresholds. We find that the correlation length increases with increasing the mass threshold while the power-law index is almost constant. For log10M200 ≥ 13.6 h−1 M⊙, we find s0 = 14.54 ± 0.87 h−1 Mpc and γ = 1.97 ± 0.11. We detect the BAO signal at s = 100 h−1 Mpc with a significance of 1.60σ. Fitting the CF with a Lambda cold dark matter model, we find $D_\mathrm{V}(z = 0.089)\mathit{r}^{\mathrm{ fid}}_\mathrm{ d}/\mathit{r}_\mathrm{ d} = 267.62 \pm 26$ h−1 Mpc, consistent with Planck 2015 cosmology. We present a set of 108 high-fidelity simulated galaxy cluster light-cones from the high-resolution Uchuu N-body simulation, employed for methodological validation. We find DV(z = 0.089)/rd = 2.666 ± 0.129, indicating that our method does not introduce any bias in the parameter estimation for this small sample of galaxy clusters.