Measuring bias via the consistency relations of the large scale structure

Consistency relations for the large scale structure are exact equalities between correlation functions of different order. These relations descend from the equivalence principle and hold for primordial perturbations generated by single-field models of inflation. They are not affected by nonlinearities and hold also for biased tracers and in redshift space. We show that baryonic acoustic oscillations in the bispectrum (BS) in the squeezed limit are suppressed with respect to those in the power spectrum by a coefficient that depends on the BS configuration and on the bias parameter (and, in redshift space, also on the growth rate). We test these relations using large volume N-body simulations and show that they provide a novel way to measure large scale halo bias and, potentially, the growth rate. Since bias is obtained by comparing two directly observable quantities, the method is free from theoretical uncertainties both on the computational scheme and on the underlying cosmological model.