A Critical Look at the DESI Analysis Methodology

Abstract

In this note, we show that the methodology used by the DESI collaboration and others for extracting cosmological parameters from 2-point galaxy correlations is fundamentally flawed. The problem with that method is that it is based on the use of a fiducial cosmology to determine the comoving coordinates of galaxies, which are then used to fix parameters, but the method is circular and is guaranteed to return the fiducial parameters as the optimal solution, no matter what model or set of parameters is used. We also point out several arguments against the existence of baryonic acoustic oscillations on large scales, and a significant problem with the FRW model when the latter is used to investigate events at the time of recombination.