Understand
We measure the three-dimensional cross-power spectrum of galaxy density and intrinsic alignment (IA) fields for the first time from the spectroscopic and imaging data of SDSS-III BOSS galaxies, for each of the four samples in the redshift range $0.2 < z < 0.75$.
- In the measurement we use the power spectrum estimator, developed in our previous work, to take into account the line-of-sight dependent projection of galaxy shapes onto the sky coordinate and the $E/B$-mode decomposition of the spin-2 shape field.
- Our method achieves a significant detection of the $E$-mode power spectrum with the total signal-to-noise ratio comparable with that of the quadrupole moment of the galaxy density power spectrum, while the measured $B$-mode power spectra are consistent with a null signal to within the statistical errors for all the galaxy samples.
- We also show that, compared to the previous results based on the two-dimensional projected correlation function, our method improves the precision of the linear shape bias parameter estimation by up to a factor of two thanks to the three-dimensional information.