The Fourier-space galaxy bispectrum is complex, with the imaginary part arising from leading-order relativistic corrections, due to Doppler, gravitational redshift and related line-of-sight effects in redshift space. The detection of the imaginary part of the bispectrum is potentially a smoking gun signal of relativistic contributions. We investigate whether next-generation spectroscopic surveys could make such a detection. For a Stage IV spectroscopic Hα survey similar to Euclid, we find that the cumulative signal to noise of this relativistic signature is O(10). Long-mode relativistic effects couple to short-mode Newtonian effects in the galaxy bispectrum, but not in the galaxy power spectrum. This is the basis for detectability of relativistic effects in the bispectrum of a single galaxy survey, whereas the power spectrum requires multiple galaxy surveys to detect the corresponding signal.
@article{arxiv.1911.02398,
title = {Detecting the relativistic galaxy bispectrum},
author = {Roy Maartens and Sheean Jolicoeur and Obinna Umeh and Eline M. De Weerd and Chris Clarkson and Stefano Camera},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.02398},
year = {2021}
}