Improving baryon acoustic oscillation measurement with the combination of cosmic voids and galaxies.

We develop a methodology to optimise the measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) from a given galaxy sample. In our previous work, we demonstrated that one can measure BAO from tracers in under-dense regions (voids). In this study, we combine the over-dense and under-dense tracers (galaxies & voids) to obtain better constraints on the BAO scale. To this end, a generalised de-wiggled BAO model with an additional parameter is developed to describe both the BAO peak and the underlying exclusion pattern of void 2PCFs. We show that after applying BAO reconstruction to galaxies, the BAO peak scale of both galaxies and voids are unbiased using the modified model. Furthermore, we exploit a new description of the combined 2PCF for a multi-tracer analysis with galaxies and voids. In simulations, the joint sample improves by more than 10% the constraint for the post-reconstruction BAO peak position compared to the result from galaxies alone, which is equivalent to an enlargement of the survey volume by 20%. Applying this method to the BOSS DR12 data, we have an 11% improvement for the low-z sample (0.2 < z < 0.5), but a worse constraint for the high-z sample (0.5 < z < 0.75), which is consistent with statistical fluctuations for the current survey volume. We further find that a larger sample gives a more robust improvement due to less statistical fluctuations.