Cosmological forecasts from photometric measurements of the angular correlation function

Abstract

We study forecasts for the accuracy of the determination of cosmological parameters from future large-scale photometric surveys obtained using the full shape of the 2-point galaxy angular correlation function. The effects of linear redshift-space distortion, photometric redshift Gaussian errors, galaxy bias and nonlinearities in the power spectrum are included on our analysis. The Fisher information matrix is constructed with the full covariance matrix, including the correlation between nearby redshift shells arising from the photometric redshift error. We show that under some reasonable assumptions, a survey such as the imminent Dark Energy Survey should be able to constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter w and the cold dark matter density Ωcdm with a precision of the order of 20% and 13%, respectively, from the full shape of the angular correlation function alone. When combined with priors from other observations the precision in the determination of these parameters improve to 8% and 4%, respectively. © 2011 American Physical Society.