paper

Gravitational Potential Reconstruction from Peculiar Velocity and Weak Lensing Measurements

arXiv:astro-ph/0207369 · doi:10.1086/374542

Abstract

We present an analytic method for rapidly forecasting the accuracy of gravitational potential reconstruction possible from measurement of radial peculiar velocities of every galaxy cluster with M > M_th in solid angle θ^2 and over redshift range z_min < z < z_max. These radial velocities can be determined from measurement of the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects. For a shallow survey with 0.2 < z < 0.4, coincident with the SDSS photometric survey, one mode of the gravitational potential (on length scales > 60 Mpc) can be reconstructed for every ~8 cluster velocity determinations. Deeper surveys require measurement of more clusters per S/N > 1 mode. Accuracy is limited by the ``undersampling noise'' due to our non-observation of the large fraction of mass that is not in galaxy clusters. Determining the gravitational potential will allow for detailed study of the relationship between galaxies and their surrounding large-scale density fields over a wide range of redshifts, and test the gravitational instability paradigm on very large scales. Observation of weak lensing by large-scale structure provides complementary information since lensing is sensitive to the tangential modes that do not affect the velocity.

4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJ Letters

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