The Reality of Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations

Abstract

The initial idea for baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) came about during early efforts to understand the origin of galaxies by studying perturbed versions of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) model. In more recent times, the emphasis has shifted to the idea that 2-point galaxy correlations embedded in the distribution of matter by the BAO could be used as a standard ruler to fix the parameters of cosmological models. In this paper, we first consider the actual business of extracting the correlation length from large data sets of measured galaxy locations. To facilitate this process, we introduce a much-improved method for extracting the correlation peak from the data set. Fundamental to this process in any model is the use of a fiducial cosmological model to transition from redshift space to comoving coordinate space where the correlations actually exist. The belief is that the correlation length so determined can then be reverted to redshift space to fix the parameters of cosmological models. We show, however, that this process is circular and hence of no value whatsoever for fixing model parameters. All one obtains are the parameters of the model used to transition to comoving space in the first place. Finally, we present simple arguments that show that the idea of BAO being responsible for the structure of the universe, i.e. the cosmic web, is unworkable.