Cosmological constraints from the clustering of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 luminous red galaxies.

We present the power spectrum of the reconstructed halo density field derived from a sample of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Seventh Data Release (DR7). The halo power spectrum has a direct connection to the underlying dark matter power for , well into the quasi-linear regime. This enables us to use a factor of ∼8 more modes in the cosmological analysis than an analysis with , as was adopted in the SDSS team analysis of the DR4 LRG sample. The observed halo power spectrum for is well fitted by our model: for 40 degrees of freedom for the best-fitting Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model. We find for a power-law primordial power spectrum with spectral index n_s and fixed, consistent with cosmic microwave background measurements. The halo power spectrum also constrains the ratio of the comoving sound horizon at the baryon-drag epoch to an effective distance to . Combining the halo power spectrum measurement with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP) 5 year results, for the flat ΛCDM model we find and . Allowing for massive neutrinos in ΛCDM, we find eV at the 95 per cent confidence level. If we instead consider the effective number of relativistic species N_eff as a free parameter, we find . Combining also with the Kowalski et al. supernova sample, we find and for an open cosmology with constant dark energy equation of state w. The power spectrum and a module to calculate the likelihoods are publicly available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]