http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08613
We probe the higher-order clustering of the galaxies in the final data release (DR12) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) using the method of germ-grain Minkowski Functionals (MFs). Our sample consists of 410,615 BOSS galaxies from the northern Galactic cap in the redshift range 0.450–0.595. We show the MFs to be sensitive to contributions up to the six-point correlation function for this data set. We ensure with a custom angular mask that the results are more independent of boundary effects than in previous analyses of this type. We extract the higher-order part of the MFs and quantify the difference to the case without higher-order correlations. The resulting $\chi^{2}$ value of over 10,000 for a modest number of degrees of freedom, O(200), indicates a 100-sigma deviation and demonstrates that we have a highly significant signal of the non-Gaussian contributions to the galaxy distribution. This statistical power can be useful in testing models with differing higher-order correlations. Comparing the galaxy data to the QPM and MultiDark-Patchy mocks, we find that the latter better describes the observed structure. From an order-by-order decomposition we expect that, for example, already a reduction of the amplitude of the MD-Patchy mock power spectrum by 5% would remove the remaining tension.
A. Wiegand and D. Eisenstein
Thu, 29 Sep 16
44/76
Comments: 18 pages, 18 figures