A detection of baryon acoustic oscillations from the distribution of galaxy clusters

Abstract

We calculate the correlation function of 79,091 galaxy clusters in the redshift region of \(z \leq 0.5\) selected from the WH15 cluster catalog. With a weight of cluster mass, a significant baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak is detected on the correlation function with a significance of \(3.7 \sigma\). By fitting the correlation function with a \(\Lambda\)CDM model curve, we find \(D_v(z = 0.331) r_d^{fid}/r_d = 1261.5 \pm 48\)~Mpc which is consistent with the Planck 2015 cosmology. We find that the correlation function of the higher mass sub-sample shows a higher amplitude at small scales of \(r < 80~h^{-1}{\rm Mpc}\), which is consistent with our previous result. The 2D correlation function of this large sample of galaxy clusters shows a faint BAO ring with a significance of \(1.8\sigma\), from which we find that the distance scale parameters on directions across and along the line-of-sight are \(\alpha_{\sigma} = 1.02 \pm 0.06\) and \(\alpha_{\pi} = 0.94 \pm 0.10\), respectively.