The Bispectrum of Intrinsic Alignments: II. Precision Comparison Against Dark Matter Simulations

Abstract: We measure three-dimensional bispectra of halo intrinsic alignments (IA) and dark matter overdensities in real space from N-body simulations for halos of mass $10^{12}-10^{12.5} M_\odot /h$. We show that their multipoles with respect to the line of sight can be accurately described by a tree-level perturbation theory model on large scales ($k\lesssim 0.11\,h$/Mpc) at $z=0$. For these scales and in a simulation volume of 1 Gpc/$h$, we detect the bispectrum monopole $B_{\delta\delta E}^{00}$ at $\sim 30\sigma$ and the two quadrupoles $B_{\delta \delta E}^{11}$ and $B_{\delta \delta E}^{20}$ at $\sim 25\sigma$ and $\sim 15\sigma$, respectively. We also report similar detection significances for the lowest order multipoles of $B_{\delta EE}$ and $B_{EEE}$, although these are largely driven by stochastic contributions. We show that the first and second order EFT parameters are consistent with those obtained from fitting the IA power spectrum analysis at next-to-leading order, without requiring any priors to break degeneracies for the quadratic bias parameters. Moreover, the inclusion of higher multipole moments of $B_{\delta\delta E}$ greatly reduces the errors on second order bias parameters, by factors of 5 or more. The IA bispectrum thus provides an effective means of determining higher order shape bias parameters, thereby characterizing the scale dependence of the IA signal. We also detect parity-odd bispectra such as $B_{\delta \delta B}$ and $B_{\delta EB}$ at $\sim 10 \sigma$ significance or more for $k<0.15\,h$/Mpc and they are fully consistent with the parity-even sector. Furthermore, we check that the Gaussian covariance approximation works reasonably well on the scales we consider here. These results lay the groundwork for using the bispectrum of IA in cosmological analyses.