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 k 0.2 h Mpc -1 , 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 k max = 0.1 h Mpc -1 , as was adopted in the SDSS team analysis of the DR4 LRG sample. The observed halo power spectrum for 0.02 < k < 0.2 h Mpc -1 is well fitted by our model: 2 = 39.6 for 40 degrees of freedom for