The baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the two-point correlation function of galaxies supplies a standard ruler to probe the expansion history of the Universe. We study here several galaxy selection schemes, aiming at building an emission-line galaxy (ELG) sample in the redshift range 0.6 < z < 1.7, that would be suitable for future BAO studies, providing a highly biased galaxy sample. We analyse the angular galaxy clustering of galaxy selections at the redshifts 0.5, 0.7, 0.8, 1 and 1.2 and we combine this analysis with a halo occupation distribution (HOD) model to derive the properties of the haloes these galaxies inhabit, in particular the galaxy bias on large scales. We also perform a weak lensing analysis (aperture statistics) to extract the galaxy bias and the cross-correlation coefficient and compare to the HOD prediction. We apply this analysis on a data set composed of the photometry of the deep co-addition on Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Stripe 82 (225 deg(2)), of Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/Stripe 82 deep i-band weak lensing survey and of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer infrared photometric band W1. The analysis on the SDSS-III/constant mass galaxies selection at z = 0.5 is in agreement with previous studies on the tracer, moreover we measure its cross-correlation coefficient r = 1.16 +/- 0.35. For the higher redshift bins, we confirm the trends that the brightest galaxy populations selected are strongly biased (b > 1.5), but we are limited by current data sets depth to derive precise values of the galaxy bias. A survey using such tracers of the mass field will guarantee a high significance detection of the BAO.
Stewart Cole, Xin Chen, Jean-Paul Richard Kneib, Eduardo Sanchez, Zheng Zheng, Andrei Variu, Daniel Felipe Forero Sanchez, Hua Zhang, Sun Hee Kim, Cheng Zhao, Anand Stéphane Raichoor, David Schlegel, Jiangyan Yang, Ting Tan, Zhifeng Ding, Arjun Dey