Minkowski Functionals of SDSS-III BOSS : Hints of Possible Anisotropy in the Density Field?

Understand

We present measurements of the Minkowski functionals extracted from the SDSS-III BOSS catalogs.

• After defining the Minkowski functionals, we describe how an unbiased reconstruction of these statistics can be obtained from a field with masked regions and survey boundaries, validating our methodology with Gaussian random fields and mock galaxy snapshot data.
• From the BOSS galaxy data we generate a set of four density fields in three dimensions corresponding to the northern and southern skies of LOWZ and CMASS catalogs, smoothing over large scales such that the field is perturbatively non-Gaussian.
• We extract the Minkowski functionals from each data set separately, and measure their shapes and amplitudes by fitting a Hermite polynomial expansion.