Cosmology with the Thermal-Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect.


Type
Article
Change log
Authors
Coulton, William 
Ota, Atsuhisa 
van Engelen, Alexander 
Abstract

Compton scattering of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from hot ionized gas produces a range of effects, and the leading order effects are the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich (kSZ and tSZ) effects. In the near future, CMB surveys will provide the precision to probe beyond the leading order effects. In this Letter, we study the cosmological information content of the next order term which combines the tSZ and kSZ effects, hereafter called the thermal-kinetic Sunyaev Zel'dovich (tkSZ) effect. As the tkSZ effect has the same velocity dependence as the kSZ effect, it will also have many of the useful properties of the kSZ effect. However, it also has its own, unique spectral dependence, which allows it to be isolated from all other CMB signals. We show that with currently envisioned CMB missions the tkSZ effect can be detected and can be used to reconstruct large scale velocity fields, with no appreciable bias from either the kSZ effect or other extragalactic foregrounds. Furthermore, since the tkSZ effect arises from the well-studied pressure of ionized gas, rather than the gas number density as in the kSZ effect, the degeneracy due to uncertain gas physics will be significantly reduced. Finally, for a very low-noise experiment the tkSZ effect will be measurable at higher precision than the kSZ effect.

Description
Keywords
5107 Particle and High Energy Physics, 51 Physical Sciences
Journal Title
Phys Rev Lett
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
0031-9007
1079-7114
Volume Title
125
Publisher
American Physical Society
Rights
All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/N000927/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/S000623/1)