Colliding Ghosts: Constraining Inflation with the Parity-Odd Galaxy Four-Point Function

Abstract

Could new physics break the mirror symmetry of the Universe? Utilizing recent measurements of the parity-odd four-point correlation function of BOSS galaxies, we probe the physics of inflation by placing constraints on the amplitude of a number of parity-violating models. Within canonical models of (single-field, slow-roll) inflation, no parity-asymmetry can occur; however, it has recently been shown that breaking of the standard assumptions can lead to parity violation within the Effective Field Theory of Inflation (EFTI). In particular, we consider the Ghost Condensate and Cosmological Collider scenarios -- the former for the leading and subleading operators in the EFTI and the latter for different values of mass and speed of an exchanged spin-$1$ particle -- for a total of $18$ models. Each instance yields a definite prediction for the inflationary trispectrum, which we convert to a late-time galaxy correlator prediction (through a highly non-trivial calculation) and constrain using the observed data. We find no evidence for inflationary parity-violation (with each of the $18$ models having significances below $2\sigma$), and place the first constraints on the relevant coupling strengths, at a level comparable with the theoretical perturbativity bounds. This is also the first time Cosmological Collider signatures have directly been searched for in observational data. We further show that possible secondary parity-violating signatures in galaxy clustering can be systematically described within the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure. We argue that these late-time contributions are subdominant compared to the primordial parity-odd signal for a vast region of parameter space. In summary, the results of this paper disfavor the notion that the recent hints of parity-violation observed in the distribution of galaxies are due to new physics.

20+9 spooky pages, 4 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev. D. Code available at https://github.com/oliverphilcox/Parity-Odd-4PCF

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Inflationary interpretation of the stochastic gravitational wave background signal detected by pulsar timing array experiments
• Closed-Form Formulae for Inflation Correlators
• Parity-Odd and Even Trispectrum from Axion Inflation
• Cosmological Correlators Through the Looking Glass: Reality, Parity, and Factorisation
• Continuous Spectrum on Cosmological Collider
• No evidence for parity violation in BOSS
• Scalar-Induced Gravitational Waves from Ghost Inflation and Parity Violation
• Analytic Formulae for Inflationary Correlators with Dynamical Mass
• Optimal Estimation of the Binned Mask-Free Power Spectrum, Bispectrum, and Trispectrum on the Full Sky: Scalar Edition
• Parity-violating scalar trispectrum from a rolling axion during inflation
• Testing scale-invariant inflation against cosmological data
• A New Solution for the Observed Isotropic Cosmic Birefringence Angle and its Implications for the Anisotropic Counterpart through a Boltzmann Approach
• Probing vector chirality in the early Universe
• Phenomenology of a vector-field-induced (and possibly parity breaking) compensated isocurvature perturbation
• A Match Made in Heaven: Linking Observables in Inflationary Cosmology
• Skew-spectra: a generalization to spin-$s$