Jiamin Hou, Zachary (Zack) Slepian, and Robert (Bob) Cahn talk about their very interesting, recent paper looking for parity violation in the large scale structure. Cutting to the chase, they find evidence for it at ~7σ. They also do various systematic tests and none reduce the significance below 4σ.

Tantalisingly, parity violation in the LSS could be related to birefringence in the cosmic microwave background, with many models that would produce one, also producing the other. Avid channel viewers will remember a talk from two years ago with evidence for exactly that.

Are we seeing the beginnings of evidence for genuine parity violation on cosmological scales, or are the two hints caused by independent errors?

This is definitely a space to watch…

Jiamin: https://astro.ufl.edu/directory/jiamin-hou/

Zack: https://astro.ufl.edu/directory/zachary-slepian/

Bob: http://phyweb.lbl.gov/~rncahn/www/cahn.html

The paper (results): https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03625

The paper (earlier methods): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12004