Measurement of Parity-Odd Modes in the Large-Scale 4-Point Correlation Function of SDSS BOSS DR12 CMASS and LOWZ Galaxies

Abstract

A tetrahedron is the simplest shape that cannot be rotated into its mirror image in 3D. The 4-Point Correlation Function (4PCF), which quantifies excess clustering of quartets of galaxies over random, is the lowest-order statistic sensitive to parity violation. Each galaxy defines one vertex of the tetrahedron. Parity-odd modes of the 4PCF probe an imbalance between tetrahedra and their mirror images. We measure these modes from the largest currently available spectroscopic samples, the 280,067 Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) DR12 LOWZ ($\bar{z}=0.32$) and the 803,112 LRGS of BOSS DR12 CMASS ($\bar{z}=0.57$). In LOWZ we find $3.1\sigma$ evidence for a non-zero parity-odd 4PCF, and in CMASS we detect a parity-odd 4PCF at $7.1\sigma$. Gravitational evolution alone does not produce this effect; parity-breaking in LSS, if cosmological in origin, must stem from the epoch of inflation. We have explored many sources of systematic error and found none that can produce a spurious parity-odd \textit{signal} sufficient to explain our result. Underestimation of the \textit{noise} could also lead to a spurious detection. Our reported significances presume that the mock catalogs used to calculate the covariance sufficiently capture the covariance of the true data. We have performed numerous tests to explore this issue. The odd-parity 4PCF opens a new avenue for probing new forces during the epoch of inflation with 3D LSS; such exploration is timely given large upcoming spectroscopic samples such as DESI and Euclid.

45 pages, 38 figures, accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (16)

• New Extraction of the Cosmic Birefringence from the Planck 2018 Polarization Data
• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Observational systematics and baryon acoustic oscillations in the correlation function
• The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO (2SLAQ) Luminous Red Galaxy Survey
• Probing polarization states of primordial gravitational waves with CMB anisotropies
• Improved Constraints on Cosmic Birefringence from the WMAP and Planck Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Data
• Testing gravitational parity violation with coincident gravitational waves and short gamma-ray bursts
• Anomalous CMB polarization and gravitational chirality
• The Effect of Fiber Collisions on the Galaxy Power Spectrum Multipole
• B-modes from Cosmic Strings
• The Odd-Parity CMB Bispectrum
• Measuring Parity Violation in the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with the LISA-Taiji network
• Parity violation in the CMB trispectrum from the scalar sector
• Graph Database Solution for Higher Order Spatial Statistics in the Era of Big Data
• The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project III: A Lack of Growth Among Massive Galaxies
• Galactos: Computing the Anisotropic 3-Point Correlation Function for 2 Billion Galaxies
• Non-smooth gravity and parity violation

Cited by in corpus (42)

• Cosmological Correlators Through the Looking Glass: Reality, Parity, and Factorisation
• Consistency tests of field level inference with the EFT likelihood
• Unveiling the nonlinear dynamics of a rolling axion during inflation
• There and Back Again: Mapping and Factorising Cosmological Observables
• No evidence for parity violation in BOSS
• Scalar-Induced Gravitational Waves from Ghost Inflation and Parity Violation
• Cosmological Probes of Structure Growth and Tests of Gravity
• A roadmap to cosmological parameter analysis with third-order shear statistics III: Efficient estimation of third-order shear correlation functions and an application to the KiDS-1000 data
• Parity-violating scalar trispectrum from a rolling axion during inflation
• A New Solution for the Observed Isotropic Cosmic Birefringence Angle and its Implications for the Anisotropic Counterpart through a Boltzmann Approach
• Scalar induced gravitational waves in metric teleparallel gravity with the Nieh-Yan term
• Scalar induced gravitational waves in symmetric teleparallel gravity with a parity-violating term
• Wide-angle effects in the galaxy bispectrum
• Parity violation in primordial tensor non-Gaussianities from matter bounce cosmology
• Apparent parity violation in the observed galaxy trispectrum
• Probing vector chirality in the early Universe
• Extracting parity-violating gravitational waves from projected tidal force tensor in three dimensions
• Anatomy of Parity-violating Trispectra in Galaxy Surveys
• Phenomenology of a vector-field-induced (and possibly parity breaking) compensated isocurvature perturbation
• Breaking parity: the case of the trispectrum from chiral scalar-tensor theories of gravity
• An Analytically Tractable Marked Power Spectrum
• Forecast Analysis of Astrophysical Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background beyond general relativity: A Case Study on Brans-Dicke Gravity
• A Model for the Redshift-Space Galaxy 4-Point Correlation Function
• Probing cosmology via the clustering of critical points
• Phenomenology of Holography via Quantum Coherence on Causal Horizons
• Doppler bias: impact of peculiar velocities on color selection and the large scale structure of galaxy surveys
• First astrometric constraints on parity-violation in the gravitational wave background
• Mixing Bispectrum Multipoles Under Geometric Distortions
• On the spatial distribution of the Large-Scale structure: An Unsupervised search for Parity Violation
• Scalar parity-odd trispectrum from gravitational Chern-Simons interaction vertices
• A Match Made in Heaven: Linking Observables in Inflationary Cosmology
• Inflation with the Chern-Simons term in the Palatini formulation
• The Odd-Parity Part of the Observed Galaxy Trispectrum
• Parity Violation in Galaxy Shapes: Primordial Non-Gaussianity
• Dipole-independent measurements of nearly-zero CMB correlation: a possible symmetry of primordial causal quantum coherence
• The equation and solution of 4-point correlation function of galaxies in Gaussian approximation and its parity-odd part
• Analytical Template for the 4-Point Correlation Function Covariance Beyond the Gaussian Random Field $\mathrm{I}$: 1-Loop Corrections involving Second-Order Densities
• Analytical Template for the 4-Point Correlation Function Covariance Beyond the Gaussian Random Field $\mathrm{II}$: 1-Loop Corrections with Third-Order Densities
• Skew-spectra: a generalization to spin-$s$
• Parity-odd Four-Point Correlation Function from DESI Data Release 1 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample
• Circularly polarized gravitational waves from parity-violating scalar-tensor theory
• Bridging inflation and reheating: chiral gravitational waves from aHz to GHz