The power spectrum from the angular distribution of galaxies in the CFHTLS-Wide fields at redshift ~0.7

Abstract: We measure the real-space galaxy power spectrum on large scales at redshifts 0.5 to 1.2 using optical colour-selected samples from the CFHT Legacy Survey. With the redshift distributions measured with a preliminary ~14000 spectroscopic redshifts from the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS), we deproject the angular distribution and directly estimate the three-dimensional power spectrum. We use a maximum likelihood estimator that is optimal for a Gaussian random field giving well-defined window functions and error estimates. This measurement presents an initial look at the large-scale structure field probed by the VIPERS survey. We measure the galaxy bias of the VIPERS-like sample to be b_g=1.38 +- 0.05 (sigma_8=0.8) on scales k<0.2h/mpc averaged over 0.5<z<1.2. We further investigate three photometric redshift slices, and marginalising over the bias factors while keeping other LCDM parameters fixed, we find the matter density Omega_m=0.30+-0.06.