Possible Detection of Baryonic Fluctuations in the Large-Scale Structure Power Spectrum

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Abstract
We present a joint analysis of the power spectra of density fluctuations from three independent cosmological redshift surveys; the PSCz galaxy catalog, the APM galaxy cluster catalog and the Abell/ACO cluster catalog. Over the range 0.03 <= k <= 0.15 h/Mpc,the amplitudes of these three power spectra are related through a simple linear biasing model with b = 1.5 and b = 3.6 for Abell/ACO versus APM and Abell/ACO versus the PSCz respectively. Furthermore, the shape of these power spectra are remarkably similar despite the fact that they are comprised of significantly different objects (individual galaxies through to rich clusters). Individually, each of these surveys show visible evidence for ``valleys'' in their power spectra. We use a newly developed statistical technique called the False Discovery Rate, to show that these ``valleys'' are statistically significant. One favored cosmological explanation for such features in the power spectrum is the presence of a non-negligible baryon fraction (Omega_b/Omega_m) in the Universe which causes acoustic oscillations in the transfer function of adiabatic inflationary models. We have performed a maximum-likelihood marginalization over four important cosmological parameters of this model (Omega_m, Omega_b, n_s, H_o). We use a prior on H_0 = 69(+/-15), and find Omega_mh^2 = 0.12(+0.03/-0.02), Omega_bh^2 =0.029(+0.011/-0.015), n_s = 1.08^(+0.17/-0.20) (2 sigma confidence limits) which are fully consistent with the favored values of these cosmological parameters from the recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments. This agreement strongly suggests that we have detected baryonic oscillations in the power spectrum of matter at a level expected from a Cold Dark Matter model normalized to fit these CMB measurements.

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