Pairwise kSZ signal extraction efficacy and optical depth estimation

Abstract

We determine the efficacy of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal extraction pipeline, using pairwise kSZ measurements, in recovering unbiased estimates of the signal and inference of the associated optical depth. We consider the impact of cluster co-alignments along the line of sight, the modeling of baryonic clustering, and the presence of diffuse gas, as well as instrument beam convolution and noise. We demonstrate that two complementary approaches, aperture photometry, and a matched filter, can be used to recover an unbiased estimate of the cluster kSZ signal and the associated optical depth. Aperture photometry requires a correction factor accounting for the subtraction of signal in the annulus while the matched filter requires a tuning of the signal template profile. We show that both of these can be calibrated from simulated survey data. The optical depth estimates are also consistent with those inferred from stacked thermal SZ measurements. We apply the approaches to the publicly available Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) data. The techniques developed here provide a promising method to leverage upcoming kSZ measurements, from ACT, Simons Observatory, CCAT, and CMB-S4 with spectroscopic galaxy surveys from DESI, Euclid, and Roman, to constrain cosmological properties of the dark energy, gravity, and neutrino masses.

17 pages, 12 figures. Updated to match the published version in PRD

References in corpus (14)

• Catalog Extraction in SZ Cluster Surveys: a matched filter approach
• A measurement of secondary cosmic microwave background anisotropies from the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey
• Detection of the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with BOSS DR11 and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope
• Exploring the Energetics of Intracluster Gas with a Simple and Accurate Model
• Dark Energy Constraints from Galaxy Cluster Peculiar Velocities
• The Tau of Galaxy Clusters
• A Measurement of the Galaxy Group-Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Cross-Correlation Function
• Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Cluster Velocity Statistics
• Matched filter optimization of kSZ measurements with a reconstructed cosmological flow field
• A Future Test of Gravitation Using Galaxy Cluster Velocities
• Measurement of the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect with Planck and BOSS data
• Cosmological Implications of the Effective Field Theory of Cosmic Acceleration
• Cluster mislocation in kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect extraction
• Improved Modeling of the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Projected-Fields signal and its Cosmological Dependence

Cited by in corpus (5)

• FLAMINGO: Galaxy formation and feedback effects on the gas density and velocity fields
• kSZ Pairwise Velocity Reconstruction with Machine Learning
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Test of the Gravitational Force Law on Cosmological Scales Using the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect
• Cluster optical depth and pairwise velocity estimation using machine learning
• On the capability of high redshift kSZ measurement with galaxy surveys