Probing Intracluster Magnetic Fields with Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization

Abstract

Intracluster magnetic fields with $\sim \mu G$ strength induce Faraday rotation on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization. Measurements of this effect can potentially probe the detailed structure of intracluster magnetic fields across clusters, since the CMB polarization is a continuously varying field on the sky, in contrast to the conventional method restricted by the limited number of radio sources behind or inside a cluster. We here construct a method for extracting information on magnetic fields from measurements of the effect, combined with possible observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and X-ray emission for the same cluster which are needed to reconstruct the electron density fields. Employing the high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamic simulations performed by Dolag, Bartelmann & Lesch (1999) as a realistic model of magnetized intracluster gas distribution, we demonstrate how our reconstruction technique can well reproduce the magnetic fields, i.e., the spherically average radial profiles of the field strength and the coherence length.

20pages, 10figures, accepted for publication in APJ

References in corpus (3)

• Cluster Magnetic Fields
• Correlation of the magnetic field and the intra-cluster gas density in galaxy clusters
• The temperature-mass relation in magnetized galaxy clusters

Cited by in corpus (22)

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• The Magnetic Power Spectrum in Faraday Rotation Screens
• Axion-Like Particles, Cosmic Magnetic Fields and Gamma-Ray Astrophysics
• Secondary anisotropies of the CMB
• B polarization of the CMB from Faraday rotation
• The Effect of a Chameleon Scalar Field on the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Cosmic Magnetic Fields and the CMB
• Suzaku Observation of the Radio Halo Cluster Abell 2319: Gas Dynamics and Hard X-ray Properties
• N-body + Magnetohydrodynamical Simulations of Merging Clusters of Galaxies: Characteristic Magnetic Field Structures Generated by Bulk Flow Motion
• Observing Dark Matter via the Gyromagnetic Faraday Effect
• SZ polarisation as a probe of the intracluster medium
• CMB Polarization due to Scattering in Clusters
• Universe opacity and CMB
• Primordial quadrupole-induced polarisation from filamentary structures and galaxy clusters
• The effect of cluster magnetic field on the Sunyaev Zeldovich power spectrum
• The Chameleonic Contribution to the SZ Radial Profile of the Coma Cluster
• Power Spectra of CMB Polarization by Scattering in Clusters
• The importance of the merging activity for the kinetic polarization of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal from galaxy clusters
• Secondary B-mode polarization from Faraday rotation in clusters and galaxies
• Secondary CMB anisotropies from magnetized halos --I: Power spectra of the Faraday rotation angle and conversion rate