Baryon acoustic oscillations in the Lyα forest of BOSS DR11 quasars

We report a detection of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the flux-correlation function of the Ly forest of high-redshift quasars with a statistical significance of five standard deviations. The study uses 137,562 quasars in the redshift range 2:1 z 3:5 from the Data Release 11 (DR11) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of SDSS-III. This sample contains three times the number of quasars used in previous studies. The measured position of the BAO peak determines the angular distance, DA(z = 2:34) and expansion rate, H(z = 2:34), both on a scale set by the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd. We find DA=rd =