Constraints on anisotropic primordial non-Gaussianity from intrinsic alignments of SDSS-III BOSS galaxies

TL;DR

This paper measures the cross-power spectrum of galaxy density and intrinsic alignments from SDSS-III BOSS data, improving analysis methods and constraining primordial non-Gaussianity parameters without significant detection.

Contribution

It introduces a three-dimensional power spectrum estimator for IA, enhancing measurement precision and jointly constraining isotropic and anisotropic primordial non-Gaussianity parameters.

Findings

Significant detection of E-mode power spectrum.

Improved shape bias parameter estimation by up to a factor of two.

No significant detection of primordial non-Gaussianity parameters.

Abstract

We measure the three-dimensional cross-power spectrum of galaxy density and intrinsic alignment (IA) fields for the first time from the spectroscopic and imaging data of SDSS-III BOSS galaxies, for each of the four samples in the redshift range $0.2 < z < 0.75$. In the measurement we use the power spectrum estimator, developed in our previous work, to take into account the line-of-sight dependent projection of galaxy shapes onto the sky coordinate and the $E/B$-mode decomposition of the spin-2 shape field. Our method achieves a significant detection of the $E$-mode power spectrum with the total signal-to-noise ratio comparable with that of the quadrupole moment of the galaxy density power spectrum, while the measured $B$-mode power spectra are consistent with a null signal to within the statistical errors for all the galaxy samples. We also show that, compared to the previous results based on the two-dimensional projected correlation function, our method improves the precision of the linear shape bias parameter estimation by up to a factor of two thanks to the three-dimensional information. By performing a joint analysis of the galaxy density and IA power spectra in the linear regime, we constrain the isotropic and anisotropic local primordial non-Gaussianities (PNGs) parameters, $f_\mathrm{NL}^{s=0}$ and $f_\mathrm{NL}^{s=2}$, simultaneously, where the two types of PNGs induce characteristic scale-dependent biases at very large scales in the density and IA power spectra, respectively. We do not find any significant detection for both PNGs: the constraints $f^{s=0}_\mathrm{NL}=57^{+30}_{-29}$ and $f^{s=2}_\mathrm{NL} = -67_{-269}^{+285}$ ($68\%$ C.L.), respectively. Our method paves the way for using the IA power spectrum as a cosmological probe for current and future galaxy surveys.