The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). Exploring the
  dependence of the three-point correlation function on stellar mass and
  luminosity at 0.5<z<1.1
  The three-point correlation function (3PCF) is a powerful probe to
investigate the clustering of matter in the Universe in a complementary way
with respect to lower-order statistics, providing additional information with
respect to the two-point correlation function and allowing us to shed light on
biasing, nonlinear processes, and deviations from Gaussian statistics. In this
paper, we analyse the first data release of the VIMOS Public Extragalactic
Redshift Survey (VIPERS), determining the dependence of the three-point
correlation function on luminosity and stellar mass at $z=[0.5,1.1]$. We
exploit the VIPERS Public Data Release 1, consisting of more than 50,000
galaxies with B-band magnitudes in the range $-21.6\lesssim M_{\rm
B}-5\log(h)\lesssim-19.9$ and stellar masses in the range
$9.8\lesssim\log(M_\star[h^{-2}\,M_\odot])\lesssim 10.7$. We measure both the
connected 3PCF and the reduced 3PCF in redshift space, probing different
configurations and scales, in the range $2.5<r\,$[Mpc/h]$<20$. We find a
significant dependence of the reduced 3PCF on scales and triangle shapes, with
stronger anisotropy at larger scales ($r\sim10$ Mpc/h) and an almost flat trend
at smaller scales, $r\sim2.5$ Mpc/h. Massive and luminous galaxies present a
larger connected 3PCF, while the reduced 3PCF is remarkably insensitive to
magnitude and stellar masses in the range we explored. These trends, already
observed at low redshifts, are confirmed for the first time to be still valid
up to $z=1.1$, providing support to the hierarchical scenario for which massive
and bright systems are expected to be more clustered. The possibility of using
the measured 3PCF to provide independent constraints on the linear galaxy bias
$b$ has also been explored, showing promising results in agreement with other
probes.
