An EFT description of galaxy intrinsic alignments

Abstract

We present a general perturbative effective field theory (EFT) description of galaxy shape correlations, which are commonly known as intrinsic alignments. This rigorous approach extends current analytical modelling strategies in that it only relies on the equivalence principle. We present our results in terms of three-dimensional statistics for two- and three-point functions of both galaxy shapes and number counts. In case of the two-point function, we recover the well-known linear alignment result at leading order, but also present the full next-to-leading order expressions. In case of the three-point function we present leading order results for all the auto- and cross-correlations of galaxy shapes and densities. We use a spherical tensor basis to decompose the tensor perturbations in different helicity modes, which allows us to make use of isotropy and parity properties in the correlators. Combined with the results on projection presented in a forthcoming companion paper, our framework is directly applicable to accounting for intrinsic alignment contamination in weak lensing surveys, and to extracting cosmological information from intrinsic alignments.