English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Arguments against using h-1 Mpc units in observational cosmology

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons18611

Sánchez,  Ariel G.
Optical and Interpretative Astronomy, MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Sánchez, A. G. (2020). Arguments against using h-1 Mpc units in observational cosmology. Physical Review D, 102(12): 123511. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.102.123511.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0007-FD9E-B
Abstract
It is common to express cosmological measurements in units of h−1 Mpc. Here, we review some of the complications that originate from this practice. A crucial problem caused by these units is related to the normalization of the matter power spectrum, which is commonly characterized in terms of the linear-theory rms mass fluctuation in spheres of radius 8  h−1  Mpc, σ8. This parameter does not correctly capture the impact of h on the amplitude of density fluctuations. We show that the use of σ8 has caused critical misconceptions for both the so-called σ8 tension regarding the consistency between low-redshift probes and cosmic microwave background data and the way in which growth-rate estimates inferred from redshift-space distortions are commonly expressed. We propose to abandon the use of h−1 Mpc units in cosmology and to characterize the amplitude of the matter power spectrum in terms of σ12, defined as the mass fluctuation in spheres of radius 12 Mpc, whose value is similar to the standard σ8 for h∼0.67.