Measuring cluster masses with CMB lensing: a statistical approach

• Published in: Astronomy & Astrophysics
• Main Authors: Melin, Jean-Baptiste, Bartlett, James G.
• Other Authors: Département de Physique des Particules (ex SPP) (DPhP), Institut de Recherches sur les lois Fondamentales de l'Univers (IRFU), Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Université Paris-Saclay-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Université Paris-Saclay, AstroParticule et Cosmologie (APC (UMR_7164)), Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules du CNRS (IN2P3)-Observatoire de Paris, Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA-California Institute of Technology (CALTECH)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2015
• Subjects: methods: data analysis; cosmic background radiation; galaxies: clusters: general; methods: statistical; gravitational lensing: weak; large-scale structure of Universe; [PHYS.ASTR]Physics [physics]/Astrophysics [astro-ph]; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://hal-cea.archives-ouvertes.fr/cea-01300573; https://hal-cea.archives-ouvertes.fr/cea-01300573/document; https://hal-cea.archives-ouvertes.fr/cea-01300573/file/aa24720-14.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201424720

International audience We present a method for measuring the masses of galaxy clusters using the imprint of their gravitational lensing signal on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The method first reconstructs the projected gravitational potential with a quadratic estimator and then applies a matched filter to extract cluster mass. The approach is well-suited for statistical analyses that bin clusters according to other mass proxies. We find that current experiments, such as Planck, the South Pole Telescope and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, can practically implement such a statistical methodology, and that future experiments will reach sensitivities sufficient for individual measurements of massive systems. As illustration, we use simulations of Planck observations to demonstrate that it is possible to constrain the mass scale of a set of 62 massive clusters with prior information from X-ray observations, similar to the published Planck ESZ-XMM sample. We examine the effect of the thermal (tSZ) and kinetic (kSZ) Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signals, finding that the impact of the kSZ remains small in this context. The stronger tSZ signal, however, must be actively removed from the CMB maps by component separation techniques prior to reconstruction of the gravitational potential. Our study of two such methods highlights the importance of broad frequency coverage for this purpose. A companion paper presents application to the Planck data on the ESZ-XMM sample.