English

Signatures of a Parity-Violating Universe

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-06-22 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

What would a parity-violating universe look like? We present a numerical and theoretical study of mirror asymmetries in the late universe, using a new suite of NN-body simulations: QUIJOTE-Odd. These feature parity-violating initial conditions, injected via a simple ansatz for the imaginary primordial trispectrum and evolved into the non-linear regime. We find that the realization-averaged power spectrum, bispectrum, halo mass function, and matter PDF are not affected by our modifications to the initial conditions, deep into the non-linear regime, which we argue arises from rotational and translational invariance. In contrast, the parity-odd trispectrum of matter (measured using a new estimator), shows distinct signatures proportional to the parity-violating parameter, pNLp_{\rm NL}, which sets the amplitude of the primordial trispectrum. We additionally find intriguing signatures in the angular momentum of halos, with the primordial trispectrum inducing a non-zero correlation between angular momentum and smoothed velocity field, proportional to pNLp_{\rm NL}. Our simulation suite has been made public to facilitate future analyses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.11782,
  title  = {Signatures of a Parity-Violating Universe},
  author = {William R. Coulton and Oliver H. E. Philcox and Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.11782},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

19 pages, 9 figures. Simulations available at https://quijote-simulations.readthedocs.io/en/latest/odd.html