Probing Primordial Chirality with Galaxy Spins

Understand

Chiral symmetry is maximally violated in weak interactions, and such microscopic asymmetries in the early Universe might leave observable imprints on astrophysical scales without violating the cosmological principle.

• In this Letter, we propose a helicity measurement to detect primordial chiral violation.
• We point out that observations of halo-galaxy angular momentum directions (spins), which are frozen in during the galaxy formation process, provide a fossil chiral observable.
• From the clustering mode of large scale structure of the Universe, we construct a spin mode in Lagrangian space and show in simulations that it is a good probe of halo-galaxy spins.