Detecting the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the N-point Spatial Statistics of SDSS Galaxies

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are caused by acoustic density waves in the early universe and act as a standard ruler in the clustering pattern of galaxies in the late Universe. Measuring the BAO feature in the 2-point correlation function of a sample of galaxies allows us to estimate cosmological distances to the galaxies mean redshift, , which is important for testing and constraining the cosmology model. The BAO feature is also expected to appear in the higher order statistics. In this work we measure the generalized spatial N-point point correlation functions up to 4th order. We made measurements of the 2, 3, and 4-point correlation functions in the SDSS-III DR12 CMASS data, comprising of 777,202 galaxies. The errors and covariances matrices were estimated from 500 mock catalogues. We created a theoretical model for these statistics by measuring the N-point functions in halo catalogues produced by the approximate Lagrangian perturbation theory based simulation code, PINOCCHIO. We created simulations using initial conditions with and without the BAO feature. We find that the BAO is detected to high significance up to the 4-point correlation function.