Probing Primordial Chirality with Galaxy Spins

Abstract

Chiral symmetry is maximally violated in weak interactions, and such microscopic asymmetries in the early Universe might leave observable imprints on astrophysical scales without violating the cosmological principle. In this Letter, we propose a helicity measurement to detect primordial chiral violation. We point out that observations of halo-galaxy angular momentum directions (spins), which are frozen in during the galaxy formation process, provide a fossil chiral observable. From the clustering mode of large scale structure of the Universe, we construct a spin mode in Lagrangian space and show in simulations that it is a good probe of halo-galaxy spins. In standard model, a strong symmetric correlation between the left and right helical components of this spin mode and galaxy spins is expected. Measurements of these correlations will be sensitive to chiral breaking, providing a direct test of chiral symmetry breaking in the early Universe.

arXiv comment6 pages (including Supplemental Material), 3 figures. Matched accepted version in PRL

References in corpus (30)

• Large-Scale Structure of the Universe and Cosmological Perturbation Theory
• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Likelihoods and Parameters from the WMAP data
• Cosmological Signature of New Parity-Violating Interactions
• Chiral Primordial Gravitational Waves from a Lifshitz Point
• Connecting Angular Momentum and Galactic Dynamics: The complex Interplay between Spin, Mass, and Morphology
• Testing Tidal-Torque Theory: I. Spin Amplitude and Direction
• Cosmic Shear from Galaxy Spins
• ELUCID - Exploring the Local Universe with reConstructed Initial Density field I: Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method with Particle Mesh Dynamics
• ELUCID - Exploring the Local Universe with reConstructed Initial Density field III: Constrained Simulation in the SDSS Volume
• Galaxy Spin Statistics and Spin-Density Correlation
• Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Cosmology in a String-Dominated Universe
• Is the dark-matter halo spin a predictor of galaxy spin and size?
• Detection of a Dipole in the Handedness of Spiral Galaxies with Redshifts z ~ 0.04
• Anomalous CMB polarization and gravitational chirality
• Small neutrino masses from gravitational $\theta$-term
• The cosmological background of vector modes
• The Scalar, Vector and Tensor Contributions to CMB anisotropies from Cosmic Defects
• Nonlinear reconstruction
• On the nature and correction of the spurious S-wise spiral galaxy winding bias in Galaxy Zoo 1
• Two- and Three-Dimensional Probes of Parity in Primordial Gravity Waves
• Isobaric Reconstruction of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation
• Halo nonlinear reconstruction
• Nonlinear reconstruction of redshift space distortions
• Helmholtz Decomposition of the Lagrangian Displacement
• CUBE: An Information-optimized parallel Cosmological $N$-body Algorithm
• Parity-odd Neutrino Torque Detection
• Increasing Fisher Information by Moving-Mesh Reconstruction
• Understanding the Reconstruction of the Biased Tracer
• Nonlinear $E$-mode clustering in Lagrangian space

Cited by in corpus (29)

• Possible observational evidence that cosmic filaments spin
• Colliding Ghosts: Constraining Inflation with the Parity-Odd Galaxy Four-Point Function
• Observational detection of correlation between galaxy spins and initial conditions
• Patterns of galaxy spin directions in SDSS and Pan-STARRS show parity violation and multipoles
• Deviations from tidal torque theory: evolution of the halo spin-filament alignment
• Testing tidal alignment models for anisotropic correlations of halo ellipticities with N-body simulations
• Gravitational Faraday rotation of gravitational waves by a Kerr black hole
• Parity-odd Neutrino Torque Detection
• Observational search for primordial chirality violations using galaxy angular momenta
• The Origin of the Relation Between Stellar Angular Momentum and Stellar Mass in Nearby Disk-dominated galaxies
• Spin conservation of cosmic filaments
• Integrated perturbation theory for cosmological tensor fields. III. Projection effects
• Nonlinear Reconstruction of the Velocity Field
• Baryonic Effects on Lagrangian Clustering and Angular Momentum Reconstruction
• Spin Mode Reconstruction in Lagrangian Space
• Spin speed correlations and the evolution of galaxy-halo systems
• Extracting parity-violating gravitational waves from projected tidal force tensor in three dimensions
• Probing vector chirality in the early Universe
• Galaxy Spin Classification I: Z-wise vs S-wise Spirals With Chirality Equivariant Residual Network
• Correlating galaxy shapes and initial conditions: an observational study
• Measuring cosmic filament spin with the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect
• Reoriented Memory of Galaxy Spins for the Early Universe
• The Density Parity Model for the Evolution of the Subhalo Inner Spin Alignments with the Cosmic Web
• How the Galaxy Stellar Spins Acquire a Peculiar Tidal Connection?
• Multipole alignment in the large-scale distribution of spin direction of spiral galaxies
• Modeling the Anisotropic Tidal Effect on the Spin-Spin Correlations of Low-Mass Galactic Halos
• Parity Violation in Galaxy Shapes: Primordial Non-Gaussianity
• Lagrangian space remapping and the angular momentum reconstruction from cosmic structures
• A high-significance detection of primordial tidal torque imprints