The Baryonic Acoustic Feature and Large-Scale Clustering in the SDSS LRG
  Sample
  We examine the correlation function \xi of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS) Luminous Red Galaxy sample (LRG) at large scales (60<s<400 Mpc/h) using
the final data release (DR7; 105,831 LRGs between 0.16<z<0.47). Using mock
catalogs, we demonstrate that the observed baryonic acoustic peak and larger
scale signal are consistent with LCDM at the 1.5\sigma level. The signal at
155<s<200 Mpc/h tends to be high relative to theoretical expectations; this
slight deviation can be attributed to a bright subsample of the LRGs. Fitting
data to a non-linear, redshift-space, template based-model, we constrain the
peak position at s_p=103.6+3.6-2.4 Mpc/h when fitting the range 60<s<150 Mpc/h
(1\sigma uncertainties measured from the mocks. This redshift-space distance
s_p is related to the comoving sound horizon scale r_s after taking into
account matter clustering non-linearities, redshift distortions and galaxy
clustering bias. Mock catalogs show that the probability that a DR7-sized
sample would not have an identifiable peak is at least 10%. As a consistency
check of a fiducial cosmology, we use the observed s_p to obtain the distance
D_V=[(1+z)^2D_A^2cz/H(z)]^(1/3) relative to the acoustic scale. We find
r_s/D_V(z=0.278)=0.1394+-0.0049. This result is in excellent agreement with
Percival et. al (2009), who examine roughly the same data set, but using the
power spectrum. Comparison with other determinations in the literature are also
in very good agreement. We have tested our results against a battery of
possible systematic effects, finding all effects are smaller than our estimated
sample variance.
