The large-scale 3-point correlation function of the SDSS BOSS DR12 CMASS galaxies

Understand

We report a measurement of the large-scale 3-point correlation function of galaxies using the largest dataset for this purpose to date, 777, 202 Luminous Red Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (SDSS BOSS) DR12 CMASS sample.

• This work exploits the novel algorithm of Slepian & Eisenstein (2015b) to compute the multipole moments of the 3PCF in $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ time, with $N$ the number of galaxies.
• Leading-order perturbation theory models the data well in a compressed basis where one triangle side is integrated out.
• We also present an accurate and computationally efficient means of estimating the covariance matrix.