The Linear Point Standard Ruler for galaxy survey data: validation with
  mock catalogues
  Due to late time non-linearities, the location of the acoustic peak in the
two-point galaxy correlation function is a redshift-dependent quantity, thus it
cannot be simply employed as a cosmological standard ruler. This has motivated
the recent proposal of a novel ruler, also located in the Baryon Acoustic
Oscillation range of scales of the correlation function, dubbed the "linear
point". Unlike the peak, it is insensitive at the $0.5\%$ level to many of the
non-linear effects that distort the clustering correlation function and shift
the peak. However, this is not enough to make the linear point a useful
standard ruler. In addition, we require a model-independent method to estimate
its value from real data, avoiding the need to deploy a poorly known non-linear
model of the correlation function. In this manuscript, we precisely validate a
procedure for model-independent estimation of the linear point. We also
identify the optimal set-up to estimate the linear point from the correlation
function using galaxy catalogs. The methodology developed here is of general
validity, and can be applied to any galaxy correlation-function data. As a
working example, we apply this procedure to the LOWZ and CMASS galaxy samples
of the Twelfth Data Release (DR12) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic
Survey (BOSS), for which the estimates of cosmic distances using the linear
point have been presented in Anselmi et al. (2017) [1].
