Baryon acoustic oscillations signature in the three-point angular correlation function from the SDSS-DR12 quasar survey

Abstract: The clustering properties of the Universe at large-scales are currently being probed at various redshifts through several cosmological tracers and with diverse statistical estimators. Here we use the three-point angular correlation function (3PACF) to probe the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) features in the quasars catalogue from the twelfth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with mean redshift z = 2.225, detecting the BAO imprint with a statistical significance of 2.9{\sigma}, obtained using lognormal mocks. Following a quasi model-independent approach for the 3PACF, we find the BAO transversal signature for triangles with sides $\theta_1 = 1.0^\circ$ and $\theta_2 = 1.5^\circ$ and the angle between them of $\alpha = 1.59 \pm 0.17$ rad, a value that corresponds to the angular BAO scale ${\theta}{BAO} = 1.82^\circ \pm 0.21^\circ$ , in excellent agreement with the value found in a recent work (${\theta}{BAO} = 1.77^\circ \pm 0.31^\circ$ ) applying the 2PACF to similar data. Moreover, we performed two type of tests: one to confirm the robustness of the BAO signal in the 3PACF through random displacements in the dataset, and the other to verify the suitability of our random samples, a null test that in fact does not show any signature that could bias our results.