The bispectrum as a signature of gravitational instability in redshift space

The bispectrum provides a characteristic signature of gravitational instability that can be used to probe the Gaussianity of the initial conditions and the bias of the galaxy distribution. We study how this signature is affected by redshift distortions using perturbation theory and high-resolution numerical simulations. We obtain perturbative results for the multipole expansion of the redshift-space bispectrum that provide a natural way to break the degeneracy between bias and Omega present in measurements of the redshift-space power spectrum. We propose a phenomenological model that incorporates the perturbative results and also describes the bispectrum in the transition to the nonlinear regime. We stress the importance of nonlinear effects and show that inaccurate treatment of these can lead to significant discrepancies in the determination of bias from galaxy redshift surveys. At small scales we find that the bispectrum monopole exhibits a strong configuration dependence that reflects the velocity dispersion of clusters. Therefore the hierarchical model for the three-point function does not hold in redshift space.