Extraction of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) to percent level accuracy is challenging and demands an understanding of many potential systematic to an accuracy well below 1 per cent, in order ensure that they do not combine significantly when
compared to statistical error of the BAO measurement. Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) SDSS Data Release Eleven (DR11) reaches a distance measurement with $sim 1%$ statistical error and this prompts an extensive search for all possible sub-percent level systematic errors which could be safely ignored previously. In this paper, we analyze the potential systematics in BAO fitting methodology using mocks and data from BOSS DR10 and DR11. We demonstrate the robustness of the fiducial multipole fitting methodology to be at $0.1%-0.2%$ level with a wide range of tests in mock galaxy catalogs pre- and post-reconstruction. We also find the DR10 and DR11 data from BOSS to be robust against changes in methodology at similar level. This systematic error budget is incorporated into the the error budget of Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) DR10 and DR11 BAO measurements. Of the wide range of changes we have investigated, we find that when fitting pre-reconstructed data or mocks, the following changes have the largest effect on the best fit values of distance measurements both parallel and perpendicular to the line of sight: (a) Changes in non-linear correlation function template; (b) Changes in fitting range of the correlation function; (c) Changes to the non-linear damping model parameters. The priors applied do not matter in the estimates of the fitted errors as long as we restrict ourselves to physically meaningful fitting regions.[abridged]
We use the 2% distance measurement from our reconstructed baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) signature using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) from Padmanabhan et al. (2012) and Xu et al. (2012) co
mbined with cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP7) to measure parameters for various cosmological models. We find a 1.7% measurement of H_0 = 69.8 +/- 1.2 km/s/Mpc and a 5.0% measurement of Omega_m = 0.280 +/- 0.014 for a flat Universe with a cosmological constant. These measurements of H_0 and Omega_m are robust against a range of underlying models for the expansion history. We measure the dark energy equation of state parameter w = -0.97 +/- 0.17, which is consistent with a cosmological constant. If curvature is allowed to vary, we find that the Universe is consistent with a flat geometry (Omega_K = -0.004 +/- 0.005). We also use a combination of the 6 Degree Field Galaxy Survey BAO data, WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey data, Type Ia supernovae (SN) data, and a local measurement of the Hubble constant to explore cosmological models with more parameters. Finally, we explore the effect of varying the energy density of relativistic particles on the measurement of H_0.
