Estimating Power Spectrum of Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect from the Cross-Correlation between WMAP and 2MASS

We estimate the power spectrum of SZ(Sunyaev-Zel’dovich)-effect-induced temperature fluctuations on sub-degree scales by using the cross correlation between the three-year WMAP maps and 2MASS galaxy distribution. We produced the SZ effect maps by hydrodynamic simulation samples of the ΛCDM model, and show that the SZ effect temperature fluctuations are highly non-Gaussian. The PDF of the temperature fluctuations has a long tail. More than 70% power of the SZ effect temperature fluctuations attributes to top ∼ 1% wavelet modes (long tail events). On the other hand, the CMB temperature fluctuations basically are Gaussian. Although the mean power of CMB temperature fluctuations on sub-degree scales is much higher than that of SZ effect map, the SZ effect temperature fluctuations associated with top 2MASS clusters is comparable to the power of CMB temperature fluctuations on the same scales. Thus, from noisy WMAP maps, one can have a proper estimation of the SZ effect power at the positions of the top 2MASS clusters. The power spectrum given by these top wavelet modes is useful to constrain the parameter of density fluctuations amplitude σ8. We find that the power spectrum of these top wavelet modes of SZ effect on sub-degree scales basically is consistent with the simulation maps produced with σ8 = 0.84. The simulation samples of σ8 = 0.74 show, however, significant deviation from detected SZ power spectrum. It can be ruled out with confidence level 99% if all other cosmological parameters are the same as that given by the three-year WMAP results. Subject headings: cosmology: theory large-scale structure of the universe