Probing dark energy with baryonic acoustic oscillations from future large galaxy redshift surveys

We show that the measurement of the baryonic acoustic oscillations in large high-redshift galaxy surveys offers a precision route to the measurement of dark energy. The cosmic microwave background provides the scale of the oscillations as a standard ruler that can be measured in the clustering of galaxies, thereby yielding the Hubble parameter and angular diameter distance as a function of redshift. This, in turn, enables one to probe dark energy. We use a Fisher matrix formalism to study the statistical errors for redshift surveys up to z = 3 and report errors on cosmography while marginalizing over a large number of cosmological parameters, including a time-dependent equation of state. With redshift surveys combined with cosmic microwave background satellite data, we achieve errors of 0.037 on Omega(X), 0.10 on w(z = 0.8), and 0.28 on dw(z)/dz for the cosmological constant model. Models with less negative w(z) permit tighter constraints. We test and discuss the dependence of performance on redshift, survey conditions, and the fiducial model. We find results that are competitive with the performance of future Type Ia supernova surveys. We conclude that redshift surveys offer a promising independent route to the measurement of dark energy.