English

Bispectrum BAO and the baryon-dark matter relative velocity

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-07-20 v1

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 (αiso\alpha_{\rm 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 30%\sim30\%, 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 αiso\alpha_{\rm iso} between the two probes. We find systematic discrepancies of up to 2%2\% for bv2=±0.05b_{v^2}=\pm0.05 and up to 20%20\% for bδbc2b_{\delta^{bc}}\le-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 bv2b_{v^2} and bδbcb_{\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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18384,
  title  = {Bispectrum BAO and the baryon-dark matter relative velocity},
  author = {Adriana Nadal-Matosas and Héctor Gil-Marín and Licia Verde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18384},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 9 figures