Constraints on dark energy from the Lyα forest baryon acoustic oscillations measurement of the redshift 2.3 Hubble parameter

Abstract: We use the Busca et al. (2012) measurement of the Hubble parameter at redshift z = 2.3 in conjunction with 21 lower z measurements, from Simon et al. (2005), Gaztanaga et al. (2009), Stern et al. (2010), and Moresco et al. (2012), to place constraints on model parameters of constant and time-evolving dark energy cosmological models. The inclusion of the new Busca et al. (2012) measurement results in H(z) constraints significantly more restrictive than those derived by Farooq et al. (2012). These H(z) constraints are now more restrictive than those that follow from current Type Ia supernova (SNIa) apparent magnitude measurements (Suzuki et al. 2012). The H(z) constraints by themselves require an accelerating cosmological expansion at about 2-sigma confidence level, depending on cosmological model and Hubble constant prior used in the analysis. A joint analysis of H(z), baryon acoustic oscillation peak length scale, and SNIa data favors a spatially-flat cosmological model currently dominated by a time-independent cosmological constant but does not exclude slowly-evolving dark energy density.