Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) in the galaxy power spectrum allow us to extract the scale of the comoving sound horizon at recombination, a cosmological standard ruler accurately determined by the cosmic microwave background anisotropy data. We examine various issues important in the use of BAOs to probe dark energy. We find that if we assume a flat universe and priors on Ωm, Ωmh2, and Ωbh2 as expected from the Planck mission, the constraints on dark energy parameters (w0, w') scale much less steeply with survey area than (area)-1/2 for a given redshift range. The constraints on the dark energy density ρX(z), however, do scale roughly with (area)-1/2 due to the strong correlation between H(z) and Ωm (which reduces the effect of priors on Ωm). Dark energy constraints from BAOs are very sensitive to the assumed linear scale of matter clustering and the redshift accuracy of the survey. For a BAO survey with 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2, σ (R) = 0.4 [corresponding to kmax (z = 0) = 0.086 h Mpc-1], and σz/ (1 + z) = 0.001, we find = (0.115,0.183) and (0.069, 0.104) for survey areas of 1000 and 10,000 deg2, respectively. We find that it is critical to minimize the bias in the scale estimates in order to derive reliable dark energy constraints. For a 1000 (10,000) deg2 BAO survey, a 1 σ bias in ln H (z) leads to a 2 σ (3 σ) bias in w'. The bias in w' due to the same scale bias from ln DA (z) is slightly smaller and opposite in sign. The results from this paper will be useful in assessing different proposed BAO surveys and guiding the design of optimal dark energy detection strategies.
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