BOSS: Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) will map out the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signature with unprecedented accuracy and greatly improve the constraints on the acceleration of the expansion rate of the Universe. The BOSS survey will use all of the dark and grey time at the Apache Point Observatory (APO) 2.5-m telescope for five years from 2009-2014, as part of Sloan Digital Sky Survey III.

BOSS will employ an upgraded version of the SDSS fiber-fed spectrographs to map the redshifts of 1.5 million Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) out to z~0.7 over 10,000 square degrees, measuring the BAO signal in the large-scale galaxy correlations. A simultaneous survey of z~2.5 quasars (using 20% of the fibers) will allow us to measure the acoustic oscillations in the correlations of the Lyman-alpha forest.


Links:

BOSS overview, SDSS3 page
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and dark energy:
    a short non-technical introduction.
The echo of Einstein's greatest blunder:
    lectures given at the 2007 Santa Fe cosmology workshop.
White Paper (PDF file, technical)
LBNL CCD web page
BAO resource pages
    Reviews, related papers, etc.
links on BAO by Daniel Eisenstein
    (also source of animation at left).
Berkeley Cosmology Group

Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics