Measuring peculiar velocity and tomographic redshift dipole with DESI DR1 catalogs
Phys. Rev. D 114, 043544 – Published 24 August, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/kgvk-d4dw
Abstract
The so-called “cosmic dipole tension” challenges the cosmological principle by positing a discrepancy between the Solar System’s peculiar velocity inferred from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipole and that derived from large-scale structure number-count dipoles. Here we provide a high-precision determination of the kinematic dipole using the redshift-dipole method applied to the first data release (DR1) of the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (DESI). By exploiting the Doppler-induced modulation of observed redshifts, this estimator is intrinsically less sensitive to imaging systematics and selection-function uncertainties that can bias traditional number-count measurements. We conduct a tomographic analysis of four tracer populations, bright galaxy sample, luminous red galaxies, emission line galaxies, and quasars, spanning . Survey geometry and statistical uncertainties are quantified using 1000 EZmock realizations. We find that the high-redshift QSO sample implies a peculiar velocity of , in excellent agreement with the CMB-inferred value of . By contrast, a complementary number-count analysis yields a significantly enhanced dipole amplitude, which we attribute to leakage of large-scale power and to incompleteness within the DESI DR1 footprint. These results indicate that the redshift dipole provides a cleaner and more reliable probe of the kinematic rest frame, offering strong support for the standard kinematic interpretation at high redshift and helping to resolve the apparent dipole anomaly.