The low redshift survey at calar alto (LoRCA)

The Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) feature in the power spectrum of galaxies provides a standard ruler to measure the accelerated expansion of the Universe. To extract all available information about dark energy, it is necessary to measure a standard ruler in the local, z < 0.2, universe where dark energy dominates most the energy density of the Universe. Though the volume available in the local universe is limited, it is just big enough to measure accurately the long 100 h Mpc wave-mode of the BAO. Using cosmological N-body simulations and approximate methods based on Lagrangian perturbation theory, we construct a suite of a thousand light-cones to evaluate the precision at which one can measure the BAO standard ruler in the local universe. We find that using the most massive galaxies on the full sky (34 000 deg), i.e. a K < 14 magnitude-limited sample, one can measure the BAO scale up to a precision of 4 per cent (~1.2 per cent using reconstruction). We also find that such a survey would help to detect the dynamics of dark energy. Therefore, we propose a 3-year long observational project, named the Low Redshift survey at Calar Alto, to observe spectroscopically about 200 000 galaxies in the northern sky to contribute to the construction of aforementioned galaxy sample. The suite of light-cones is made available to the public. © 2016 The Authors.JC, CC, SRT, MPI, FP, JS and FK acknowledge support from the Spanish MICINNs Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Programme under grant MultiDark CSD2009-00064, MINECO Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa Programme under grant SEV-2012-0249, and grant AYA2014-60641-C2-1-P. JC and GY acknowledge financial support from MINECO (Spain) under project number AYA2012-31101 and FPA2012-34694. MPI acknowledges support from MINECO under the grant AYA2012-39702-C02-01. MPI thanks the Instituto de Fisica Teorica for its hospitality and support during the completion of this work. HC acknowledges support from the Lyon Institute of Origins under grant ANR-10-LABX-66. GBZ is supported by the 1000 Young Talents programme in China, and by the Strategic Priority Research Programme `The Emergence of Cosmological Structures' of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant No. XDB09000000. YW is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 11403034. RBM's research is funded under the European Seventh Framework Programme, Ideas, Grant no. 259349 (GLENCO). The BigMD simulation suite have been performed in the Supermuc supercomputer at LRZ using time granted by PRACE. This work made use of the HDAP, which was produced at Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Konigstuhl under grant No. 00.071.2005 of the Klaus-Tschira-Foundation.Peer Reviewe