Hunting down systematics in baryon acoustic oscillations after cosmic
  high noon
  Future dark energy experiments will require better and more accurate
theoretical predictions for the baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) signature
in the spectrum of cosmological perturbations. Here, we use large N-body
simulations of the \LambdaCDM Planck cosmology to study any possible systematic
shifts and damping in BAO due to the impact of nonlinear gravitational growth
of structure, scale dependent and non-local bias, and redshift-space
distortions. The effect of cosmic variance is largely reduced by dividing the
tracer power spectrum by that from a BAO-free simulation starting with the same
phases. This permits us to study with unprecedented accuracy (better than 0.02%
for dark matter and 0.07% for low-bias halos) small shifts of the pristine BAO
wavenumbers towards larger k, and non-linear damping of BAO wiggles in the
power spectrum of dark matter and halo populations in the redshift range z=0-1.
For dark matter, we provide an accurate parametrization of the evolution of
\alpha as a function of the linear growth factor D(z). For halo samples, with
bias ranging from 1.2 to 2.8, we measure a typical BAO shift of ~0.25%,
observed in real-space, which does not show an appreciable evolution with
redshift within the uncertainties. Moreover, we report a constant shift as a
function of halo bias. We find a different evolution of the damping of the
acoustic feature in all halo samples as compared to dark matter with haloes
suffering less damping, and also find some weak dependence on bias. A larger
BAO shift and damping is measured in redshift-space which can be well explained
by linear theory due to redshift-space distortions. A clear modulation in phase
with the acoustic scale is observed in the scale-dependent halo bias due to the
presence of the baryonic acoustic oscillations.
