RSD measurements from BOSS galaxy power spectrum using the halo perturbation theory model

Abstract

We present growth of structure constraints from the cosmological analysis of the power spectrum multipoles of SDSS-III BOSS DR12 galaxies. We use the galaxy power spectrum model of Hand et al. (2017), which decomposes the galaxies into halo mass bins, each of which is modeled separately using the relations between halo biases and halo mass. The model combines Eulerian perturbation theory and halo model calibrated on $N$-body simulations to model the halo clustering. In this work, we also generate the covariance matrix by combining the analytic disconnected part with the empirical connected part: we smooth the connected component by selecting a few principal components and show that it achieves good agreement with the mock covariance. Our analysis differs from recent analyses in that we constrain a single parameter $f\sigma_8$ fixing everything else to Planck+BAO prior, thereby reducing the effects of prior volume and mismodeling. We find tight constraints on $f\sigma_8$: $f\sigma_8(z_{\mathrm{eff}}=0.38)=0.489 \pm 0.038$ and $f\sigma_8(z_{\mathrm{eff}}=0.61)=0.455 \pm 0.028$ at $k_{\mathrm{max}} = 0.2\ h$Mpc$^{-1}$, with an overall amplitude error of 5%, and in good agreement (within 0.3 sigma) of Planck amplitude. We discuss the sensitivity of cosmological parameter estimation to the choice of scale cuts, covariance matrix, and the inclusion of hexadecapole $P_4(k)$. We show that with $k_{\mathrm{max}} = 0.4\ h$Mpc$^{-1}$ the constraints improve considerably to an overall 3.2% amplitude error, but there is some evidence of model misspecification on MultiDark-PATCHY mocks. Choosing $k_{\mathrm{max}}$ consistently and reliably remains the main challenge of RSD analysis methods.