Tracing The Sound Horizon Scale With Photometric Redshift Surveys
  We propose a new method for cosmological parameters extraction using the
baryon acoustic oscillation scale as a standard ruler in deep galaxy surveys
with photometric determination of redshifts. The method consists in a simple
empirical parametric fit to the angular 2-point correlation function w(theta).
It is parametrized as a power law to describe the continuum plus a Gaussian to
describe the BAO bump. The location of the Gaussian is used as the basis for
the measurement of the sound horizon scale. This method, although simple,
actually provides a robust estimation, since the inclusion of the power law and
the use of the Gaussian removes the shifts which affect the local maximum. We
discuss the effects of projection bias, non-linearities, redshift space
distortions and photo-z precision, and apply our method to a mock catalog of
the Dark Energy Survey, built upon a large N-body simulation provided by the
MICE collaboration. We discuss the main systematic errors associated to our
method and show that they are dominated by the photo-z uncertainty.
