Accurate analytic model for the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich one-point probability distribution function

Quantitative Description of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect: Analytic Approximations

Various aspects of relativistic calculations of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect are explored and clarified. We first formally show that the main previous approaches to the calculation of the relativistically generalized thermal component of the effect are equivalent. Our detailed description of the full effect results in a somewhat improved formulation. Analytic approximations to the exact calcula...

The Sunyaev - Zeldovich Effect

During passage through a cluster of galaxies some of the photons of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation are scattered by electrons in the hot intracluster (IC) gas. The scattering slightly modifies the incident Planck spectrum, imprinting on it a unique spectral signature that was first described by Sunyaev & Zeldovich (1972). [The impact of hypothetical hot intergalactic gas on the...

Reconstructing the Peak Distribution in the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect Surveys

We examine the ability of the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect (SZE) statistics proposed by Lee (2002) using numerical simulations. The statistics describe the distribution of the peak heights in the noise-contaminated SZE sky maps, and provide an analysis technique to sort out the noise-contamination effect and estimate the number density of real clusters. The method is devised to be suitable for the...

Sunyaev–Zeldovich Effect

Sunyaev-Zeldovich Fluctuations from the First Stars?

WMAP’s detection of high electron-scattering optical depth τe suggests substantial star formation at high redshift z ∼ 17±5. On the other hand, the recovered σ8 ∼ 0.84± 0.04 disfavors a cluster Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) origin for the observed small-scaleCMB fluctuation excess, which generally requires σ8 ∼ 1.1. Here we consider the effects of high-redshift star formation on the CMB. We derive a f...