The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmic flows and cosmic web from luminous red galaxies

We present a Bayesian phase-space reconstruction of the cosmic large-scale matter density and velocity fields from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III Baryon Oscillations Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 12 CMASS galaxy clustering catalogue. We rely on a given Λ cold dark matter cosmology, a mesh resolution in the range of 6–10 h⁻¹ Mpc, and a lognormal-Poisson model with a redshift-dependent non-linear bias. The bias parameters are derived from the data and a general renormalized perturbation theory approach. We use combined Gibbs and Hamiltonian sampling, implemented in the argo code, to iteratively reconstruct the dark matter density field and the coherent peculiar velocities of individual galaxies, correcting hereby for coherent redshift space distortions. Our tests relying on accurate N-body-based mock galaxy catalogues show unbiased real space power spectra of the non-linear density field up to k ∼ 0.2 h Mpc⁻¹, and vanishing quadrupoles down to r ∼ 20 h⁻¹ Mpc. We also demonstrate that the non-linear cosmic web can be obtained from the tidal field tensor based on the Gaussian component of the reconstructed density field. We find that the reconstructed velocities have a statistical correlation coefficient compared to the true velocities of each individual light-cone mock galaxy of r ∼ 0.68 including about 10 per cent of satellite galaxies with virial motions (about r = 0.75 without satellites). The power spectra of the velocity divergence agree well with theoretical predictions up to k ∼ 0.2 h Mpc⁻¹. This work will be especially useful to improve, for example, baryon acoustic oscillation reconstructions, kinematic Sunyaev–Zeldovich, integrated Sachs–Wolfe measurements or environmental studies.