Boosted Odds: Lower-Point Probes of Parity Violation with Momentum Fields
Parity-violating initial conditions are uniquely compelling signatures of inflationary dynamics beyond the single-field slow-roll paradigm, and their effects on the distribution of late-time observables can be easily separated from that of gravitational nonlinearities and galaxy formation physics. In this work, we propose using the momentum field, $\mathbf{p} = (1+δ)\mathbf{v}$, and, in particular, the density-density-momentum bispectrum as a novel probe of primordial parity violation. This class of bispectra greatly complements traditional searches using four-point statistics of the density field, furnishing new observables that can be sensitive to parity-violating physics. At the same time, its lower dimensionality substantially reduces the complexity associated with analysing high-dimensional data vectors and their covariance. We show that the sensitivity of the density-density-momentum bispectrum to parity violation effects persists even if we can only observe the projection of the momentum field along the line-of-sight. We perform a Fisher forecast for the parity-violating amplitude of the ultra-squeezed template in the cross bispectrum of kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) anisotropies and galaxy clustering, and we find that our approach give competitive constraints when compared to existing methods. Our method can be easily co-opted to existing pipelines to study parity violation and, as the galaxy-galaxy-kSZ bispectrum is a key cosmological probe, take advantage of the significant existing efforts dedicated to mitigating systematics and covariance modelling.