Angular Diameter Distance Measurement with Galaxy Clustering in the Multipole Space

The shape of the angular power spectrum of galaxies in the linear regime is defined by the horizon size at the matter-radiation equality. When calibrated by cosmic microwave background measurements, the shape of the clustering spectrum can be used as a standard ruler to estimate angular diameter distance as a function of redshift at which galaxy clustering is measured. We apply the proposed cosmological test of Cooray et al. (2001) to a recent set of luminous red galaxy angular clustering spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey between redshifts of 0.2 and 0.6. Using the overall shape of the clustering power spectrum in the linear regime, we measure comoving angular diameter distances to eight redshift bins by marginalizing over the bias factors that determine the overall amplitude of the clustering spectrum in each of the bins. The Hubble constant consistent with these distance estimates is 68.5+6.7 −6.1 km s −1 Mpc−1 at the 68% confidence level. We comment on the expected improvements with future surveys and the potential to measure dark energy parameters with this method. Subject headings: cosmology: observations — cosmology: theory — galaxies: fundamental parameters — large scale structure