Bispectrum BAO and the baryon-dark matter relative velocity

arXiv:2607.18384 · astro-ph.CO · Submitted 2026-07-20 · Read on arXiv

Adriana Nadal-Matosas, Héctor Gil-Marín, Licia Verde

astro-ph.CO

Submitted: 2026-07-20

Comments: 28 pages, 9 figures

Code: https://github.com/hectorgil/PTcool

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We evaluate the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) signal in the bispectrum as a tool to detect and characterize the relative velocity effect.

Terminology

Abstract

We evaluate the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) signal in the bispectrum as a tool to detect and characterize the relative velocity effect. We extend the existing framework by presenting an updated model for the redshift-space tree-level bispectrum that comprehensively incorporates all relative velocity terms. We introduce a novel, unbiased technique to extract the isotropic BAO dilation parameter (alpha iso) solely from the bispectrum monopole. Validated against N-body simulations, this template-based extraction successfully recovers the acoustic scale and enhances the statistical constraining power by about30%, when analyzed in tandem with the pre-reconstruction power spectrum, offering a powerful complement to standard post-reconstruction pipelines. We quantify how individual relative velocity components distort both two- and three-point statistics. We find that these effects induce distinct systematic shifts in the extracted alpha iso between the two probes. We find systematic discrepancies of up to 2% for b v squared= plus or minus0.05 and up to 20% for b delta bc-2. This differences demonstrate that a direct comparison of independent power spectrum and bispectrum BAO measurements can break parameter degeneracies and isolate the amplitude of these biases. Finally, we provide a concrete prescription to detect and constrain the three associated relative velocity bias parameters, showing that a joint analysis is highly sensitive to the b v squared and b delta bc amplitudes. This establishes the bispectrum BAO as a robust cosmological probe for current and next-generation galaxy surveys, serving both as a cross-check for standard analyses and a crucial diagnostic tool against systematic biases.

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