Cosmological Constraints from Moments of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

Abstract

In this paper, we explain how moments of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect can constrain both cosmological parameters and the astrophysics of the intracluster medium (ICM). As the tSZ signal is strongly non-Gaussian, higher moments of tSZ maps contain useful information. We first calculate the dependence of the tSZ moments on cosmological parameters, finding that higher moments scale more steeply with sigma_8 and are sourced by more massive galaxy clusters. Taking advantage of the different dependence of the variance and skewness on cosmological and astrophysical parameters, we construct a statistic, |<T^3>|/<T^2>^1.4, which cancels much of the dependence on cosmology (i.e., sigma_8) yet remains sensitive to the astrophysics of intracluster gas (in particular, to the gas fraction in low-mass clusters). Constraining the ICM astrophysics using this statistic could break the well-known degeneracy between cosmology and gas physics in tSZ measurements, allowing for tight constraints on cosmological parameters. Although detailed simulations will be needed to fully characterize the accuracy of this technique, we provide a first application to data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope. We estimate that a Planck-like full-sky tSZ map could achieve a <1% constraint on sigma_8 and a 1-sigma error on the sum of the neutrino masses that is comparable to the existing lower bound from oscillation measurements.

11 pages, 12 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Rev. D; v2: 14 pages, 16 figures, matches PRD accepted version (changes from v1 include additional calculations with primordial non-Gaussianity and a new appendix discussing the tSZ kurtosis)

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• Detection of Thermal SZ -- CMB Lensing Cross-Correlation in Planck Nominal Mission Data
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Component-separated maps of CMB temperature and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect
• Taking the Universe's Temperature with Spectral Distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Cosmology from the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Power Spectrum: Primordial non-Gaussianity and Massive Neutrinos
• Nuw CDM cosmology from the weak lensing convergence PDF
• CMB/kSZ and Compton-$y$ Maps from 2500 square degrees of SPT-SZ and Planck Survey Data
• The Two-Halo Term in Stacked Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Measurements: Implications for Self-Similarity
• CMB Lensing Beyond the Power Spectrum: Cosmological Constraints from the One-Point PDF and Peak Counts
• Foreground Biases on Primordial Non-Gaussianity Measurements from the CMB Temperature Bispectrum: Implications for Planck and Beyond
• Assessing the Importance of Noise from Thermal Sunyaev-Zel{'}dovich Signals for CMB Cluster Surveys and Cluster Cosmology
• An improved Compton parameter map of thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect from Planck PR4 data
• MillimeterDL: Deep Learning Simulations of the Microwave Sky
• Non-Gaussianity of secondary anisotropies from ACTPol and Planck
• An Accurate Analytic Model for the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich One-Point PDF
• Hydrodynamical chemistry simulations of the SZ effect and the impacts from primordial non-Gaussianities
• Constraining cosmology with thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich maps: Minkowski functionals, peaks, minima, and moments
• Breaking degeneracies with the Sunyaev-Zeldovich full bispectrum