F01: First Year Results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)

Thu. April 4, 9:06 a.m. – 9:42 a.m. PDT

Ballroom A1, Floor 2

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration is conducting a 5 year redshift survey of 40 million extra-galactic sources over 14,000 square degrees of the northern sky. One of its primary goals is to measure the cosmic expansion history with baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). We present the measurement of BAO in the Lyman-alpha forests of high redshift quasars from the DESI first year data set, using the two-point correlation function of about 450,000 Lyman-alpha forest spectra and their correlation with the position of about 700,000 quasars. The analysis was developed on a blinded data set, and was un-blinded only after verifying the accuracy of the method with synthetic data, and the consistency of the results with several data splits and variations in the analysis choices. We obtain the most precise measurement to date of the angular diameter and Hubble distances relative to the sound horizon at recombination in the redshift range 2 to 4, with an aggregate isotropic precision of 1.1 percent at an effective redshift of 2.34.