Title: Detecting Galaxy-Filament Alignments in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III,
Abstract: Previous studies have shown the filamentary structures in the cosmic web
influence the alignments of nearby galaxies. We study this effect in the LOWZ
sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using the "Cosmic Web Reconstruction"
filament catalogue of Chen et al. (2016). We find that LOWZ galaxies exhibit a
small but statistically significant alignment in the direction parallel to the
orientation of nearby filaments. This effect is detectable even in the absence
of nearby galaxy clusters, which suggests it is an effect from the matter
distribution in the filament. A nonparametric regression model suggests that
the alignment effect with filaments extends over separations of $30-40$ Mpc. We
find that galaxies that are bright and early-forming align more strongly with
the directions of nearby filaments than those that are faint and late-forming;
however, trends with stellar mass are less statistically significant, within
the narrow range of stellar mass of this sample.