The Santa Fe Light Cone Simulation Project: I. Confusion and the WHIM in Upcoming Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Surveys

Abstract

We present the first results from a new generation of simulated large sky coverage (~100 square degrees) Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE) cluster surveys using the cosmological adaptive mesh refinement N-body/hydro code Enzo. We have simulated a very large (512^3h^{-3}Mpc^3) volume with unprecedented dynamic range. We have generated simulated light cones to match the resolution and sensitivity of current and future SZE instruments. Unlike many previous studies of this type, our simulation includes unbound gas, where an appreciable fraction of the baryons in the universe reside. We have found that cluster line-of-sight overlap may be a significant issue in upcoming single-dish SZE surveys. Smaller beam surveys (~1 arcmin) have more than one massive cluster within a beam diameter 5-10% of the time, and a larger beam experiment like Planck has multiple clusters per beam 60% of the time. We explore the contribution of unresolved halos and unbound gas to the SZE signature at the maximum decrement. We find that there is a contribution from gas outside clusters of ~16% per object on average for upcoming surveys. This adds both bias and scatter to the deduced value of the integrated SZE, adding difficulty in accurately calibrating a cluster Y-M relationship. Finally, we find that in images where objects with M > 5x10^{13} M_{\odot} have had their SZE signatures removed, roughly a third of the total SZE flux still remains. This gas exists at least partially in the Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), and will possibly be detectable with the upcoming generation of SZE surveys.

14 pages, 13 figures, version accepted to ApJ. Major revisions made

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• Reconstructing mass profiles of simulated galaxy clusters by combining Sunyaev-Zeldovich and X-ray images
• The Impact of Halo Properties, Energy Feedback and Projection Effects on the Mass-SZ Flux Relation
• Constraints on First-Light Ionizing Sources from Optical Depth of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Probing the Large-Scale Structure Around the Most Distant Galaxy Clusters from the Massive Cluster Survey
• Constraining Dark Energy with Clusters: Complementarity with Other Probes
• Numerical simulations of the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium
• The Effects of Halo Assembly Bias on Self-Calibration in Galaxy Cluster Surveys
• Kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Cosmic Microwave Background Temperature Anisotropies Generated by Gas in Cosmic Structures
• Issues in joint SZ and optical cluster finding
• The contribution of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect from the Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium to the Five-Year WMAP Data
• Emulating Sunyaev-Zeldovich Images of Galaxy Clusters using Auto-Encoders
• Why are we still using 3D masses for cluster cosmology?