Slepian, Zachary, Eisenstein, Daniel J., Brownstein, Joel R., Chuang, Chia-Hsun, Gil-Marín, Héctor, Ho, Shirley, Kitaura, Francisco-Shu, Percival, Will J., Ross, Ashley J., Rossi, Graziano, Seo, Hee-Jong, Slosar, Anže, and Vargas-Magaña, Mariana. 2017. "Detection of baryon acoustic oscillation features in the large-scale three-point correlation function of SDSS BOSS DR12 CMASS galaxies." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 469:1738-1751. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx488
We present the large-scale three-point correlation function (3PCF) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR12 Constant stellar Mass (CMASS) sample of 777 202 Luminous Red Galaxies, the largest-ever sample used for a 3PCF or bispectrum measurement. We make the first high-significance (4.5σ) detection of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the 3PCF. Using these acoustic features in the 3PCF as a standard ruler, we measure the distance to z = 0.57 to 1.7 per cent precision (statistical plus systematic). We find DV = 2024 ± 29 Mpc (stat) ± 20 Mpc (sys) for our fiducial cosmology (consistent with Planck 2015) and bias model. This measurement extends the use of the BAO technique from the two-point correlation function (2PCF) and power spectrum to the 3PCF and opens an avenue for deriving additional cosmological distance information from future large-scale structure redshift surveys such as DESI. Our measured distance scale from the 3PCF is fairly independent from that derived from the pre-reconstruction 2PCF and is equivalent to increasing the length of BOSS by roughly 10 per cent; reconstruction appears to lower the independence of the distance measurements. Fitting a model including tidal tensor bias yields a moderate-significance (2.6σ) detection of this bias with a value in agreement with the prediction from local Lagrangian biasing.
