Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Signal Research Articles

Unveiling ν secrets with cosmological data: Neutrino masses and mass hierarchy

Using some of the latest cosmological datasets publicly available, we derive the strongest bounds in the literature on the sum of the three active neutrino masses, $M_\nu$, within the assumption of a background flat $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. In the most conservative scheme, combining Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies and baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) data, as well as the up-to-date constraint on the optical depth to reionization ($\tau$), the tightest $95\%$ confidence level (C.L.) upper bound we find is $M_\nu<0.151$~eV. The addition of Planck high-$\ell$ polarization data, which however might still be contaminated by systematics, further tightens the bound to $M_\nu<0.118$~eV. A proper model comparison treatment shows that the two aforementioned combinations disfavor the IH at $\sim 64\%$~C.L. and $\sim 71\%$~C.L. respectively. In addition, we compare the constraining power of measurements of the full-shape galaxy power spectrum versus the BAO signature, from the BOSS survey. Even though the latest BOSS full shape measurements cover a larger volume and benefit from smaller error bars compared to previous similar measurements, the analysis method commonly adopted results in their constraining power still being less powerful than that of the extracted BAO signal. Our work uses only cosmological data; imposing the constraint $M_\nu>0.06\,{\rm eV}$ from oscillations data would raise the quoted upper bounds by ${\cal O}(0.1\sigma)$ and would not affect our conclusions.

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: final data release and the metallicity of UV-luminous galaxies

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey measured the redshifts of over 200,000 UV-selected (NUV<22.8 mag) galaxies on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The survey detected the baryon acoustic oscillation signal in the large scale distribution of galaxies over the redshift range 0.2<z<1.0, confirming the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe and measuring the rate of structure growth within it. Here we present the final data release of the survey: a catalogue of 225415 galaxies and individual files of the galaxy spectra. We analyse the emission-line properties of these UV-luminous Lyman-break galaxies by stacking the spectra in bins of luminosity, redshift, and stellar mass. The most luminous (-25 mag < MFUV <-22 mag) galaxies have very broad H-beta emission from active nuclei, as well as a broad second component to the [OIII] (495.9 nm, 500.7 nm) doublet lines that is blue shifted by 100 km/s, indicating the presence of gas outflows in these galaxies. The composite spectra allow us to detect and measure the temperature-sensitive [OIII] (436.3 nm) line and obtain metallicities using the direct method. The metallicities of intermediate stellar mass (8.8<log(M*/Msun)<10) WiggleZ galaxies are consistent with normal emission-line galaxies at the same masses. In contrast, the metallicities of high stellar mass (10<log(M*/Msun)<12) WiggleZ galaxies are significantly lower than for normal emission-line galaxies at the same masses. This is not an effect of evolution as the metallicities do not vary with redshift; it is most likely a property specific to the extremely UV-luminous WiggleZ galaxies.

Mitigating the impact of the DESI fiber assignment on galaxy clustering

We present a simple strategy to mitigate the impact of an incomplete spectroscopic redshift galaxy sample as a result of fiber assignment and survey tiling. The method has been designed for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) galaxy survey but may have applications beyond this. We propose a modification to the usual correlation function that nulls the almost purely angular modes affected by survey incompleteness due to fiber assignment. Predictions of this modified statistic can be calculated given a model of the two point correlation function. The new statistic can be computed with a slight modification to the data catalogues input to the standard correlation function code and does not incur any additional computational time. Finally we show that the spherically averaged baryon acoustic oscillation signal is not biased by the new statistic.

Baryonic acoustic oscillations from 21 cm intensity mapping: the Square Kilometre Array case

We quantitatively investigate the possibility of detecting baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) using single-dish 21cm intensity mapping observations in the post-reionization era. We show that the telescope beam smears out the isotropic BAO signature and, in the case of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) instrument, makes it undetectable at redshifts $z\gtrsim1$. We however demonstrate that the BAO peak can still be detected in the radial 21cm power spectrum and describe a method to make this type of measurements. By means of numerical simulations, containing the 21cm cosmological signal as well as the most relevant Galactic and extra-Galactic foregrounds and basic instrumental effect, we quantify the precision with which the radial BAO scale can be measured in the 21cm power spectrum. We systematically investigate the signal-to-noise and the precision of the recovered BAO signal as a function of cosmic variance, instrumental noise, angular resolution and foreground contamination. We find that the expected noise levels of SKA would degrade the final BAO errors by $\sim5\%$ with respect to the cosmic-variance limited case at low redshifts, but that the effect grows up to $\sim65\%$ at $z\sim2-3$. Furthermore, we find that the radial BAO signature is robust against foreground systematics, and that the main effect is an increase of $\sim20\%$ in the final uncertainty on the standard ruler caused by the contribution of foreground residuals as well as the reduction in sky area needed to avoid high-foreground regions. We also find that it should be possible to detect the radial BAO signature with high significance in the full redshift range. We conclude that a 21cm experiment carried out by the SKA should be able to make direct measurements of the expansion rate $H(z)$ with competitive per-cent level precision on redshifts $z\lesssim2.5$.

Measuring the 2D baryon acoustic oscillation signal of galaxies in WiggleZ: cosmological constraints.

We present results from the 2D anisotropic baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal present in the final data set from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey. We analyse the WiggleZ data in two ways: first using the full shape of the 2D correlation function and secondly focusing only on the position of the BAO peak in the reconstructed data set. When fitting for the full shape of the 2D correlation function we use a multipole expansion to compare with theory. When we use the reconstructed data we marginalize over the shape and just measure the position of the BAO peak, analysing the data in wedges separating the signal along the line of sight from that parallel to the line of sight. We verify our method with mock data and find the results to be free of bias or systematic offsets. We also redo the pre-reconstruction angle-averaged (1D) WiggleZ BAO analysis with an improved covariance and present an updated result. The final results are presented in the form of Ωc h2, H(z), and DA(z) for three redshift bins with effective redshifts z = 0.44, 0.60, and 0.73. Within these bins and methodologies, we recover constraints between 5 and 22 per cent error. Our cosmological constraints are consistent with flat ΛCDM cosmology and agree with results from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey.

Extragalactic survey aims to shed light on dark energy

Robot-controlled optical fibers will help create 3D map of the cosmos.

The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Fourier space

We analyse the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) signal of the final Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) data release (DR12). Our analysis is performed in Fourier-space, using the power spectrum monopole and quadrupole. The dataset includes $1\,198\,006$ galaxies over the redshift range $0.2 < z < 0.75$. We divide this dataset into three (overlapping) redshift bins with the effective redshifts $\zeff = 0.38$, $0.51$ and $0.61$. We demonstrate the reliability of our analysis pipeline using N-body simulations as well as $\sim 1000$ MultiDark-Patchy mock catalogues, which mimic the BOSS-DR12 target selection. We apply density field reconstruction to enhance the BAO signal-to-noise ratio. By including the power spectrum quadrupole we can separate the line-of-sight and angular modes, which allows us to constrain the angular diameter distance $D_A(z)$ and the Hubble parameter $H(z)$ separately. We obtain two independent $1.6\%$ and $1.5\%$ constraints on $D_A(z)$ and $2.9\%$ and $2.3\%$ constraints on $H(z)$ for the low ($\zeff=0.38$) and high ($\zeff=0.61$) redshift bin, respectively. We obtain two independent $1\%$ and $0.9\%$ constraints on the angular averaged distance $D_V(z)$, when ignoring the Alcock-Paczynski effect. The detection significance of the BAO signal is of the order of $8\sigma$ (post-reconstruction) for each of the three redshift bins. Our results are in good agreement with the Planck prediction within $\Lambda$CDM. This paper is part of a set that analyses the final galaxy clustering dataset from BOSS. The measurements and likelihoods presented here are combined with others in~\citet{Alam2016} to produce the final cosmological constraints from BOSS.

Signatures of the Primordial Universe from Its Emptiness: Measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Minima of the Density Field.

Sound waves from the primordial fluctuations of the Universe imprinted in the large-scale structure, called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), can be used as standard rulers to measure the scale of the Universe. These oscillations have already been detected in the distribution of galaxies. Here we propose to measure BAOs from the troughs (minima) of the density field. Based on two sets of accurate mock halo catalogues with and without BAOs in the seed initial conditions, we demonstrate that the BAO signal cannot be obtained from the clustering of classical disjoint voids, but it is clearly detected from overlapping voids. The latter represent an estimate of all troughs of the density field. We compute them from the empty circumsphere centers constrained by tetrahedra of galaxies using Delaunay triangulation. Our theoretical models based on an unprecedented large set of detailed simulated void catalogues are remarkably well confirmed by observational data. We use the largest recently publicly available sample of luminous red galaxies from SDSS-III BOSS DR11 to unveil for the first time a >3σ BAO detection from voids in observations. Since voids are nearly isotropically expanding regions, their centers represent the most quiet places in the Universe, keeping in mind the cosmos origin and providing a new promising window in the analysis of the cosmological large-scale structure from galaxy surveys.

Measuring baryon acoustic oscillations from the clustering of voids

We investigate the necessary methodology to optimally measure the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal, from voids based on galaxy redshift catalogues. To this end, we study the dependency of the BAO signal on the population of voids classified by their sizes. We find for the first time the characteristic features of the correlation function of voids including the first robust detection of BAOs in mock galaxy catalogues. These show an anti-correlation around the scale corresponding to the smallest size of voids in the sample (the void exclusion effect), and dips at both sides of the BAO peak, which can be used to determine the significance of the BAO signal without any priori model. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that there is a scale dependent bias for different populations of voids depending on the radius, with the peculiar property that the void population with the largest BAO significance corresponds to tracers with approximately zero bias on the largest scales. We further investigate the methodology on an additional set of 1,000 realistic mock galaxy catalogues reproducing the SDSS-III/BOSS CMASS DR11 data, to control the impact of sky mask and radial selection function. Our solution is based on generating voids from randoms including the same survey geometry and completeness, and a post-processing cleaning procedure in the holes and at the boundaries of the survey. The methodology and optimal selection of void populations validated in this work have been used to perform the first BAO detection from voids in observations, presented in a companion paper.

The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the correlation function of LOWZ and CMASS galaxies in Data Release 12

We present distance scale measurements from the baryon acoustic oscillation signal in the CMASS and LOWZ samples from the Data Release 12 of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). The total volume probed is 14.5 Gpc$^3$, a 10 per cent increment from Data Release 11. From an analysis of the spherically averaged correlation function, we infer a distance to $z=0.57$ of $D_V(z)r^{\rm fid}_{\rm d}/r_ {\rm d}=2028\pm21$ Mpc and a distance to $z=0.32$ of $D_V(z)r^{\rm fid}_{\rm d}/r_{\rm d}=1264\pm22$ Mpc assuming a cosmology in which $r^{\rm fid}_{\rm d}=147.10$ Mpc. From the anisotropic analysis, we find an angular diameter distance to $z=0.57$ of $D_{\rm A}(z)r^{\rm fid}_{\rm d}/r_{\rm d}=1401\pm21$ Mpc and a distance to $z=0.32$ of $981\pm20$ Mpc, a 1.5 per cent and 2.0 per cent measurement respectively. The Hubble parameter at $z=0.57$ is $H(z)r_{\rm d}/r^{\rm fid}_{\rm d}=100.3\pm3.7$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ and its value at $z=0.32$ is $79.2\pm5.6$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$, a 3.7 per cent and 7.1 per cent measurement respectively. These cosmic distance scale constraints are in excellent agreement with a $\Lambda$CDM model with cosmological parameters released by the recent Planck 2015 results.

The C iv forest as a probe of baryon acoustic oscillations

Abstract In light of recent successes in measuring baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in quasar absorption using the Lyman α (Lyα) transition, I explore the possibility of using the 1548 Å transition of triply ionized carbon (C iv) as a tracer. While the Lyα forest is a more sensitive tracer of intergalactic gas, it is limited by the fact that it can only be measured in the optical window at redshifts z &amp;gt; 2. Quasars are challenging to identify and observe at these high redshifts, but the C iv forest can be probed down to redshifts z ≈ 1.3, taking full advantage of the peak in the redshift distribution of quasars that can be targeted with high efficiency. I explore the strength of the C iv absorption signal and show that the absorbing population on the red side of the Lyα emission line is dominated by C iv (and so will dominate over the potential BAO signal of other metals). As a consequence, I argue that forthcoming surveys may have a sufficient increase in quasar number density to offset the lower sensitivity of the C iv forest and provide competitive precision using both the C iv autocorrelation and the C iv-quasar cross-correlation at 〈z〉 ≈ 1.6.

Lagrangian or Eulerian; real or Fourier? Not all approaches to large-scale structure are created equal

We present a pedagogical systematic investigation of the accuracy of Eulerian and Lagrangian perturbation theories of large-scale structure. We show that significant differences exist between them especially when trying to model the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). We find that the best available model of the BAO in real space is the Zel'dovich Approximation (ZA), giving an accuracy of ≲3% at redshift of z = 0 in modelling the matter 2-pt function around the acoustic peak. All corrections to the ZA around the BAO scale are perfectly perturbative in real space. Any attempt to achieve better precision requires calibrating the theory to simulations because of the need to renormalize those corrections. In contrast, theories which do not fully preserve the ZA as their solution, receive \U0001d4aa(1) corrections around the acoustic peak in real space at z = 0, and are thus of suspicious convergence at low redshift around the BAO. As an example, we find that a similar accuracy of 3% for the acoustic peak is achieved by Eulerian Standard Perturbation Theory (SPT) at linear order only at z ≈ 4. Thus even when SPT is perturbative, one needs to include loop corrections for z≲4 in real space.In Fourier space, all models perform similarly, and are controlled by the overdensity amplitude, thus recovering standard results. However, that comes at a price.Real space cleanly separates the BAO signal from non-linear dynamics. In contrast, Fourier space mixes signal from short mildly non-linear scales with the linear signal from the BAO to the level that non-linear contributions from short scales dominate. Therefore, one has little hope in constructing a systematic theory for the BAO in Fourier space.

Remapping dark matter halo catalogues between cosmological simulations

We present and test a method for modifying the catalogue of dark matter haloes produced from a given cosmological simulation, so that it resembles the result of a simulation with an entirely different set of parameters. This extends the method of Angulo & White (2010), which rescales the full particle distribution from a simulation. Working directly with the halo catalogue offers an advantage in speed, and also allows modifications of the internal structure of the haloes to account for nonlinear differences between cosmologies. Our method can be used directly on a halo catalogue in a self contained manner without any additional information about the overall density field: although the large-scale displacement field is required by the method, this can be inferred from the halo catalogue alone. We show proof of concept of our method by rescaling a matter-only simulation with no baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) features to a more standard LCDM model containing a cosmological constant and a BAO signal. In conjunction with the halo occupation approach, this method provides a basis for the rapid generation of mock galaxy samples spanning a wide range of cosmological parameters.

Cosmological information in the intrinsic alignments of luminous red galaxies

The intrinsic alignments of galaxies are usually regarded as a contaminant to weak gravitational lensing observables. The alignment of Luminous Red Galaxies, detected unambiguously in observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, can be reproduced by the linear tidal alignment model of Catelan, Kamionkowski & Blandford (2001) on large scales. In this work, we explore the cosmological information encoded in the intrinsic alignments of red galaxies. We make forecasts for the ability of current and future spectroscopic surveys to constrain local primordial non-Gaussianity and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) in the cross-correlation function of intrinsic alignments and the galaxy density field. For the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, we find that the BAO signal in the intrinsic alignments is marginally significant with a signal-to-noise ratio of 1.8 and 2.2 with the current LOWZ and CMASS samples of galaxies, respectively, and increasing to 2.3 and 2.7 once the survey is completed. For the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and for a spectroscopic survey following the EUCLID redshift selection function, we find signal-to-noise ratios of 12 and 15, respectively. Local type primordial non-Gaussianity, parametrized by fNL = 10, is only marginally significant in the intrinsic alignments signal with signal-to-noise ratios < 2 for the three surveys considered.

MASS-DEPENDENT BARYON ACOUSTIC OSCILLATION SIGNAL AND HALO BIAS

We characterize the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) feature in halo two-point statistics using N-body simulations. We find that nonlinear damping of the BAO signal is less severe for halos in the mass range we investigate than for dark matter. The amount of damping depends weakly on the halo mass. The correlation functions show a mass-dependent drop of the halo clustering bias below roughly 90 Mpc/h, which coincides with the scale of the BAO trough. The drop of bias is 4% for halos with mass M>10^{14} Msun/h and reduces to roughly 2% for halos with mass M>10^{13} Msun/h. In contrast, halo biases in simulations without BAO change more smoothly around 90 Mpc/h. In Fourier space, the bias of M>10^{14} Msun/h halos decreases smoothly by 11% from wavenumber k = 0.012 h/Mpc to 0.2 h/Mpc, whereas that of M>10^{13} Msun/h halos decreases by less than 4% over the same range. By comparing the halo biases in pairs of otherwise identical simulations, one with and the other without BAO, we also observe a modulation of the halo bias. These results suggest that precise calibrations of the mass-dependent BAO signal and scale-dependent bias on large scales would be needed for interpreting precise measurements of the two-point statistics of clusters or massive galaxies in the future.

Measuring DA and H at z=0.35 from the SDSS DR7 LRGs using baryon acoustic oscillations

We present measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A(z) and the Hubble parameter H(z) at z=0.35 using the anisotropy of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal measured in the galaxy clustering distribution of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) sample. Our work is the first to apply density-field reconstruction to an anisotropic analysis of the acoustic peak. Reconstruction partially removes the effects of non-linear evolution and redshift-space distortions in order to sharpen the acoustic signal. We present the theoretical framework behind the anisotropic BAO signal and give a detailed account of the fitting model we use to extract this signal from the data. Our method focuses only on the acoustic peak anisotropy, rather than the more model-dependent anisotropic information from the broadband power. We test the robustness of our analysis methods on 160 LasDamas DR7 mock catalogues and find that our models are unbiased at the ~0.2% level in measuring the BAO anisotropy. After reconstruction we measure D_A(z=0.35)=1050+/-38 Mpc and H(z=0.35)=84.4+/-7.0 km/s/Mpc assuming a sound horizon of r_s=152.76 Mpc. Note that these measurements are correlated with a correlation coefficient of 0.58. This represents a factor of 1.4 improvement in the error on D_A relative to the pre-reconstruction case; a factor of 1.2 improvement is seen for H.

Wavelet analysis of baryon acoustic structures in the galaxy distribution

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are a feature imprinted in the density field by acoustic waves travelling in the plasma of the early universe. Their fixed scale can be used as a standard ruler to study the geometry of the universe. BAO have been previously detected using correlation functions and power spectra of the galaxy distribution. In this work, we present a new method for the detection of the real-space structures associated with this feature. These baryon acoustic structures are spherical shells with a relatively small density contrast, surrounding high density central regions. We design a specific wavelet adapted to the search for shells, and exploit the physics of the process by making use of two different mass tracers, introducing a specific statistic to detect the BAO features. We show the effect of the BAO signal in this new statistic when applied to the Lambda - Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model, using an analytical approximation to the transfer function. We confirm the reliability and stability of our method by using cosmological N-body simulations from the MareNostrum Institut de Ci\`encies de l'Espai (MICE). We apply our method to the detection of BAO in a galaxy sample drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We use the `Main' catalogue to trace the shells, and the Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) as tracers of the high density central regions. Using this new method, we detect, with a high significance, that the LRGs in our sample are preferentially located close to the centres of shell-like structures in the density field, with characteristics similar to those expected from BAOs. We show that stacking selected shells, we can find their characteristic density profile. We have delineated a new feature of the cosmic web, the BAO shells. As these are real spatial structures, the BAO phenomenon can be studied in detail by examining those shells.

THE CORRELATION FUNCTION OF GALAXY CLUSTERS AND DETECTION OF BARYON ACOUSTIC OSCILLATIONS

We calculate the correlation function of 13,904 galaxy clusters of z \leq 0.4 selected from the cluster catalog of Wen, Han & Liu. The correlation function can be fitted with a power-law model \xi(r)=(r/R_0)^{\gamma} on the scales of 10h^(-1)Mpc \leq r \leq 50h^(-1)Mpc, with a larger correlation length of R_0=18.84\pm0.27 h^(-1)Mpc for clusters with a richness of R \geq 15 and a smaller length of R_0=16.15 \pm 0.13 h^(-1)Mpc for clusters with a richness of R \geq 5. The power law index of \gamma=2.1 is found to be almost the same for all cluster subsamples. A pronounced baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) peak is detected at r ~ 110 h^(-1)Mpc with a significance of ~ 1.9\sigma. By analyzing the correlation function in the range of 20 h^(-1)Mpc \leq r \leq 200 h^(-1)Mpc, we find the constraints on distance parameters are D_v(0.276)=1077\pm55(1\sigma) Mpc and h=0.73 \pm 0.039 (1\sigma), which are consistent with the WMAP 7-year cosmology. However, the BAO signal from the cluster sample is stronger than expected and leads to a rather low matter density \Omega_m h^2=0.093\pm0.0077 (1\sigma), which deviates from the WMAP 7-year result by more than 3 \sigma. The correlation function of the GMBCG cluster sample is also calculated and our detection of the BAO feature is confirmed.

Non-Gaussian errors of baryonic acoustic oscillations

We revisit the uncertainty in baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) forecasts and data analyses. In particular, we study how much the uncertainties on both the measured mean dilation scale and the associated error bar are affected by the non-Gaussianity of the non-linear density field. We examine two possible impacts of non-Gaussian analysis: (1) we derive the distance estimators from Gaussian theory, but use 1000 N-Body simulations to measure the actual errors, and compare this to the Gaussian prediction, and (2) we compute new optimal estimators, which requires the inverse of the non-Gaussian covariance matrix of the matter power spectrum. Obtaining an accurate and precise inversion is challenging, and we opted for a noise reduction technique applied on the covariance matrices. By measuring the bootstrap error on the inverted matrix, this work quantifies for the first time the significance of the non-Gaussian error corrections on the BAO dilation scale. We find that the variance (error squared) on distance measurements can deviate by up to 12% between both estimators, an effect that requires a large number of simulations to be resolved. We next apply a reconstruction algorithm to recover some of the BAO signal that had been smeared by non-linear evolution, and we rerun the analysis. We find that after reconstruction, the rms error on the distance measurement improves by a factor of ~1.7 at low redshift (consistent with previous results), and the variance ({\sigma}^2) shows a change of up to 18% between optimal and sub-optimal cases (note, however, that these discrepancies may depend in detail on the procedure used to isolate the BAO signal). We finally discuss the impact of this work on current data analyses.

Simulations of BAO reconstruction with a quasar Ly-αsurvey

The imprint of Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) on the matter power spectrum can be constrained using the neutral hydrogen density in the intergalactic medium as a tracer of the matter density. One of the goals of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) is to derive the Hubble expansion rate and the angular scale from the BAO signal in the IGM. To this aim, the Lyman-alpha forest of 10^5 quasars will be observed in the redshift range 2.2<z<3.5 and over 10,000 deg^2. We simulated the BOSS QSO survey to estimate the statistical accuracy on the BAO scale determination provided by such a large scale survey. In particular, we discuss the effect of the poorly constrained estimate of the unabsorbed intrinsic quasar spectrum. The volume of current N-body simulations being too small for such studies, we resorted to Gaussian random field (GRF) simulations. We validated the use of GRFs by comparing the output of GRF simulations with that of the Horizon N-body simulation with the same initial conditions. Realistic mock samples of QSO Lyman-\alpha forest were generated; their power spectrum was computed and fitted to obtain the BAO scale. The rms of the results for 100 different simulations provides an estimate of the statistical error expected from the BOSS survey. We confirm the results from Fisher matrix estimate. In the absence of error on the unabsorbed quasar spectrum, the BOSS quasar survey should measure the BAO scale with an error of the order of 2.3%, or the transverse and radial BAO scales separately with errors of the order of 6.8% and 3.9%, respectively. The significance of the BAO detection is assessed by an average \Delta\chi^2=17 but for individual realizations \Delta\chi^2 ranges from 2 t o 35. The error on the unabsorbed quasar spectrum increases the error on the BAO scale by 10 to 20% and results in a sub percent bias.