Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in WMAP and its effect on cosmological parameters

We use multi-frequency information in first year WMAP data to search for the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. WMAP has sufficiently broad frequency coverage to constrain SZ without the addition of higher frequency data: the SZ power spectrum amplitude is expected to increase 50% from W to Q frequency band. This, in combination with the low noise in WMAP, allows us to strongly constrain the SZ contribution. We derive an optimal frequency combination of WMAP cross-spectra to extract SZ in the presence of noise, CMB, and radio point sources, which are marginalized over. We find that the SZ contribution is less than 2% (95% c.l.) at the first acoustic peak in W band. Under the assumption that the removed radio point sources are not correlated with SZ this limit implies σ8 < 1.07 at 95% c.l. We investigate the effect on the cosmological parameters of allowing an SZ component. We run Monte Carlo Markov Chains with and without an SZ component and find that the addition of SZ does not affect any of the cosmological conclusions. We conclude that SZ does not contaminate the WMAP CMB or change cosmological parameters, refuting the recent claims that they may be corrupted.