No evidence for parity violation in BOSS

Abstract

Recent studies have found evidence for parity violation in the BOSS spectroscopic galaxy survey, with statistical significance as high as $7\sigma$. These analyses assess the significance of the parity-odd four-point correlation function (4PCF) with a statistic called ${\chi }^2$. This statistic is biased if the parity-even eight-point correlation function (8PCF) of the data differs from the mock catalogs. We construct new statistics ${\chi }_{\times }^2$, ${\chi }_{\mathrm{null}}^2$ that separate the parity violation signal from the 8PCF bias term, allowing them to be jointly constrained. Applying these statistics to BOSS, we find that the parity violation signal ranges from $0$ to $2.5\sigma$ depending on analysis choices, whereas the 8PCF bias term is $\sim 6\sigma$. We conclude that there is no compelling evidence for parity violation in BOSS. Our new statistics can be used to search for parity violation in future surveys, such as DESI, without 8PCF biases.

46 pages, 11 figures; comments welcome!

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Anatomy of Parity-violating Trispectra in Galaxy Surveys
• Breaking parity: the case of the trispectrum from chiral scalar-tensor theories of gravity
• Doppler bias: impact of peculiar velocities on color selection and the large scale structure of galaxy surveys
• On the spatial distribution of the Large-Scale structure: An Unsupervised search for Parity Violation
• Inflation with the Chern-Simons term in the Palatini formulation
• Signatures of asymmetry: Gravitational wave memory and the parity violation
• The Odd-Parity Part of the Observed Galaxy Trispectrum
• Parity Violation in Galaxy Shapes: Primordial Non-Gaussianity
• Bridging inflation and reheating: chiral gravitational waves from aHz to GHz
• Parity-odd Four-Point Correlation Function from DESI Data Release 1 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample