  The intrinsic alignments of galaxies are usually regarded as a contaminant to
weak gravitational lensing observables. The alignment of Luminous Red Galaxies,
detected unambiguously in observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, can
be reproduced by the linear tidal alignment model of Catelan, Kamionkowski &
Blandford (2001) on large scales. In this work, we explore the cosmological
information encoded in the intrinsic alignments of red galaxies. We make
forecasts for the ability of current and future spectroscopic surveys to
constrain local primordial non-Gaussianity and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
(BAO) in the cross-correlation function of intrinsic alignments and the galaxy
density field. For the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, we find that
the BAO signal in the intrinsic alignments is marginally significant with a
signal-to-noise ratio of 1.8 and 2.2 with the current LOWZ and CMASS samples of
galaxies, respectively, and increasing to 2.3 and 2.7 once the survey is
completed. For the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and for a spectroscopic
survey following the EUCLID redshift selection function, we find
signal-to-noise ratios of 12 and 15, respectively. Local type primordial
non-Gaussianity, parametrized by fNL = 10, is only marginally significant in
the intrinsic alignments signal with signal-to-noise ratios < 2 for the three
surveys considered.
