The Hobby‐Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment

Hill, Gary J.; Gebhardt, Karl; Komatsu, Eiichiro; MacQueen, Phillip J.

doi:10.1063/1.1848329

The Hobby‐Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment

Dec 14, 2004

Part of The new cosmology. Proceedings, Conference on Strings and Cosmology, College Station, USA, March 14-17, 2004, and Mitchell Symposium on Observational Cosmology, College Station, USA, April 12-16, 2004, 224

Published in:

AIP Conf.Proc. 743 (2004) 1, 224

Contribution to:

Strings and Cosmology, 224

Published: Dec 14, 2004

DOI:

10.1063/1.1848329

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Abstract: (AIP)

We propose the use of Ly‐α emitting galaxies as the tracer of the power spectrum, and describe the Visible IFU Replicable Ultra‐cheap Spectrograph (VIRUS), capable of undertaking such a survey. VIRUS will be a very wide field integral field spectrograph of a new replicated design, consisting of more than a hundred individual spectrograph units. The VIRUS instrument mounted on a new wide field corrector on the Hobby‐Eberly Telescope (HET) will allow 1 million Ly‐α emitting galaxies to be mapped over 1.8 < z < 3.8 in 200 square degrees of sky, a volume 10 times that of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in 100 nights of operation. This survey of large scale structure is sufficient to measure the power spectrum to 2–3% accuracy and constrain the positions of the baryonic acoustical peaks on the matter spectrum to ⩽ 1%. This in turn provides sufficient accuracy on H(z) and DA(z) to challenge the level of dark energy constraint expected from the SNAP satellite at a fraction of the cost, while providing unique constraints at z>2. The baryonic acoustical peaks method is largely free of systematic biases and provides an independent test of results found by other methods.

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