Abstract
Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) provide an important standard ruler which can be used to probe the recent expansion history of our Universe. We show how a simple extension of the diagnostic, which we call , can combine standard ruler information from BAO with standard candle information from type Ia supernovae (SNIa) to yield a powerful novel null diagnostic of the cosmological constant hypothesis. A unique feature of is that it requires minimal cosmological assumptions since its determination does not rely upon prior knowledge of either the current value of the matter density and the Hubble constant or the distance to the last scattering surface. Observational uncertainties in these quantities, therefore, do not affect the reconstruction of . We reconstruct using the Union 2.1 SNIa data set and BAO data from SDSS, WiggleZ and 6dFGS. Our results are consistent with dark energy being the cosmological constant. We show how and can be used to obtain accurate model-independent constraints on the properties of dark energy from future data sets such as BigBOSS.
- Received 9 June 2012
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.86.103527
© 2012 American Physical Society