Measuring Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Millions of Supernovae

Since type Ia Supernovae (SNe) explode in galaxies, they can, in principle, be used as the same tracer of the large-scale structure as their hosts to measure baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). To realize this, one must obtain a dense integrated sampling of SNe over a large fraction of the sky, which may only be achievable photometrically with future projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The advantage of SN BAOs is that SNe have more uniform luminosities and more accurate photometric redshifts than galaxies, but the disadvantage is that they are transitory and hard to obtain in large number at high redshift. We find that a half-sky photometric SN survey to redshift z = 0.8 is able to measure the baryon signature in the SN spatial power spectrum. Although dark energy constraints from SN BAOs are weak, they can significantly improve the results from SN luminosity distances of the same data, and the combination of the two is no longer sensitive to cosmic microwave background priors.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, ApJL accepte

The Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and The Singularity Problem in Quantum Cosmology

We apply the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics to homogeneous quantum cosmology and show that the quantum theory is independent of any time-gauge choice and there is no issue of time. We exemplify this result by studying a particular minisuperspace model where the quantum potential driven by a prescribed quantum state prevents the formation of the classical singularity, independently on the choice of the lapse function. This means that the fast-slow-time gauge conjecture is irrelevant within the framework of the causal interpretation of quantum cosmology.Comment: 18 pages, LaTe