Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III website is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University. We acknowledge the use of the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA). Support for LAMBDA is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Some of the CMASS reconstruction and MCMC computations were supported by facilities and staff of the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences High Performance Computing Center. LOWZ reconstruction computations were supported by the facilities and staff of the UK Sciama High Performance Computing cluster supported by SEPNet and the University of Portsmouth. Power spectrum calculations, and fitting made use of the COSMOS/Universe supercomputer, a UK-CCC facility supported by HEFCE and STFC in cooperation with CGI/Intel. We thank Christian Reichardt for his help in using the actlite likelihood code.

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 (DR11) sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = (1264 ± 25 Mpc)(rd/rd,fid) at z = 0.32 and DV = (2056 ± 20 Mpc)(rd/rd,fid) at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = (1421 ± 20 Mpc)(rd/rd,fid) and H = (96.8 ± 3.4 km s-1 Mpc-1)(rd,fid/rd). Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Authors

Anderson, Lauren et al.-- Full list of authors: Anderson, Lauren; Aubourg, Éric; Bailey, Stephen; Beutler, Florian; Bhardwaj, Vaishali; Blanton, Michael; Bolton, Adam S.; Brinkmann, J.; Brownstein, Joel R.; Burden, Angela; Chuang, Chia-Hsun; Cuesta, Antonio J.; Dawson, Kyle S.; Eisenstein, Daniel J.; Escoffier, Stephanie; Gunn, James E.; Guo, Hong; Ho, Shirley; Honscheid, Klaus; Howlett, Cullan; Kirkby, David; Lupton, Robert H.; Manera, Marc; Maraston, Claudia; McBride, Cameron K.; Mena, Olga; Montesano, Francesco; Nichol, Robert C.; Nuza, Sebastián E.; Olmstead, Matthew D.; Padmanabhan, Nikhil; Palanque-Delabrouille, Nathalie; Parejko, John; Percival, Will J.; Petitjean, Patrick; Prada, Francisco; Price-Whelan, Adrian M.; Reid, Beth; Roe, Natalie A.; Ross, Ashley J.; Ross, Nicholas P.; Sabiu, Cristiano G.; Saito, Shun; Samushia, Lado; Sánchez, Ariel G.; Schlegel, David J.; Schneider, Donald P.; Scoccola, Claudia G.; Seo, Hee-Jong; Skibba, Ramin A.; Strauss, Michael A.; Swanson, Molly E. C.; Thomas, Daniel; Tinker, Jeremy L.; Tojeiro, Rita; Magaña, Mariana Vargas; Verde, Licia; Wake, David A.; Weaver, Benjamin A.; Weinberg, David H.; White, Martin; Xu, Xiaoying; Yèche, Christophe; Zehavi, Idit; Zhao, Gong-Bo

Peer reviewed