The kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect of the large-scale structure (I): dependence on neutrino mass

The study of neutrinos in astrophysics requires the combination of different observational probes. The temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background induced via the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect may provide interesting information since they are expected to receive sig...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Roncarelli, Mauro, Villaescusa-Navarro, Francisco, Baldi, Marco
Format: Text
Language:unknown
Published: arXiv 2017
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Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1702.00676
https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00676
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Summary:The study of neutrinos in astrophysics requires the combination of different observational probes. The temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background induced via the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect may provide interesting information since they are expected to receive significant contribution from high-redshift plasma. We present a set of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations that include a treatment of the neutrino component considering four different sum of neutrino masses: $Σm_ν=(0,0.15,0.3,0.6)$ eV. Using their outputs, we modelled the kSZ effect due to the large-scale structure after the reionization by producing mock maps, then computed the kSZ power spectrum and studied how it depends on $z_{\rm re}$ and $Σm_ν$. We also run a set of four simulations to study and correct possible systematics due to resolution, finite box size and astrophysics. With massless neutrinos we obtain $\mathcal{D}^{\rm kSZ}_{3000}=4.0$ $μ{\rm K}^2$ ($z_{\rm re}$=8.8), enough to account for all of the kSZ signal of $\mathcal{D}^{\rm kSZ}_{3000}=(2.9\pm1.3)$ $μ{\rm K}^2$ measured with the South Pole Telescope. This translates into an upper limit on the kSZ effect due to patchy reionization of $\mathcal{D}^{\rm kSZ,patchy}_{3000}<1.0$ $μ{\rm K}^2$ (95 per cent confidence level). Massive neutrinos induce a damping of kSZ effect power of about 8, 12 and 40 per cent for $Σm_ν=(0.15,0.3,0.6)$ eV, respectively. We study the dependence of the kSZ signal with $z_{\rm re}$ and the neutrino mass fraction, $f_ν$, and obtain $\mathcal{D}^{\rm kSZ}_{3000}\propto z_{\rm re}^{0.26}(1-f_ν)^{14.3}$. Interestingly, the scaling with $f_ν$ is significantly shallower with respect to the equivalent thermal SZ effect, and may be used to break the degeneracy with other cosmological parameters. : 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS