Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the LSST Photometric Survey

LSST LSS Science CollaborationInternational audienceBaryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) studies provide an important probe of dark energy, yielding constraints that are highly complementary to other methods such as weak gravitational lensing and very competitive to other proposed large surveys. By measuring the BAO scale in ugrizy-band photometric redshift-selected samples, LSST will determine the angular diameter distance to each of a dozen redshifts with percent-level errors. However, photometric redshift (a.k.a. photo-z) errors can dilute the observed strength of the BAO signal. We therefore investigate the impact of simulated photo-z errors on the reconstruction of the BAO scale using Monte Carlo simulations of mock galaxy samples with luminosity-color-redshift distributions designed to agree with those from the GOODS survey. In this poster, we demonstrate the effects that (i) the level of statistical uncertainty in photo-z's, (ii) the fraction of catastrophic photometric redshift outliers, or (iii) the choice of galaxy sample population has on the significance with which the BAO signal is detected