The extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: A cosmological forecast

We present a science forecast for the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) survey. Focusing on discrete tracers, we forecast the expected accuracy of the baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO), the redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements, the fNL parameter quantifying the primordial non-Gaussianity, the dark energy and modified gravity parameters.We also use the line-of-sight clustering in the Lyman a forest to constrain the total neutrino mass.We find that eBOSS luminous red galaxies, emission line galaxies and clustering quasars can achieve a precision of 1, 2.2 and 1.6 per cent, respectively, for spherically averaged BAO distance measurements. Using the same samples, the constraint on fσ₈ is expected to be 2.5, 3.3 and 2.8 per cent, respectively. For primordial non-Gaussianity, eBOSS alone can reach an accuracy of σ(f_NL) ~ 10-15. eBOSS can at most improve the dark energy figure of merit by a factor of 3 for the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parametrization, and can well constrain three eigenmodes for the general equation-of-state parameter. eBOSS can also significantly improve constraints on modified gravity parameters by providing the RSD information, which is highly complementary to constraints obtained from weak lensingmeasurements. A principal component analysis shows that eBOSS can measure the eigenmodes of the effective Newton's constant to 2 per cent precision; this is a factor of 10 improvement over that achievable without eBOSS. Finally, we derive the eBOSS constraint (combined with Planck, Dark Energy Survey and BOSS) on the total neutrino mass, σ(Σm_ν) = 0.03 eV (68 per cent CL), which in principle makes it possible to distinguish between the two scenarios of neutrino mass hierarchies.