1998/12/10 by Avery Meiksin, A. Meiksin, Martin White +1 · 251 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Baryon #Baryon acoustic oscillations #Cold dark matter #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark energy #Dark matter #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Matter power spectrum #Perturbation (astronomy) #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Redshift #Spectral density #Statistics #Weak gravitational lensing #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.1999.02369.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 304(4), 851-864 (Oxford University Press) · 16 pages, 13 Figures, to be published in MNRAS
arxiv created 1998/12/10 · openalex publication_date 1999/04/16 · arxiv updated 2010/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the consequences of a non-negligible baryon fraction for models of structure formation in cold dark matter dominated cosmologies, emphasizing in particular the existence of oscillations in the present-day matter power spectrum. These oscillations are the remnants of acoustic oscillations in the photon—baryon fluid before the last scattering, for which evidence from measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy is mounting. For acceptable values of the cosmological and baryon densities, the oscillations modulate the power by up to ∼ 10 per cent, with a ‘period’ in spatial wavenumber that is close to δ k ∼ 0.05 Mpc−1. We study the effects of non-linear evolution on these features, and show that they are erased for k≥0.2 hMpc−1. At larger scales, the features evolve as expected from second-order perturbation theory: the visibility of the oscillations is affected only weakly by non-linear evolution. No realistic CDM parameter combination is able to account for the claimed feature at k≈0.1 h−1Mpc in the APM power spectrum, or the excess power at 100 h−1Mpc wavelengths quoted by several recent surveys. Thus baryonic oscillations are not predicted to dominate existing measurements of clustering. We examine several effects that may mask the features that are predicted, and conclude that future galaxy surveys may be able to detect the oscillatory features in the power spectrum provided baryons comprise ≥15 per cent of the total density, but it will be a technically challenging achievement.