Deconstructing Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich - Gravitational Lensing Cross-Correlations: Implications for the Intracluster Medium

TL;DR

This paper explores how cross-correlations between the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and gravitational lensing can probe the intracluster medium, providing insights into baryon distribution and feedback processes in galaxy clusters.

Contribution

It demonstrates that these cross-correlations are dominated by hot gas in the ICM and forecasts how upcoming experiments can constrain ICM pressure profiles and feedback models.

Findings

Cross-correlations mainly probe hot ICM gas, not missing baryons.

tSZ-CMB lensing is more sensitive to low-mass, high-redshift halos.

Upcoming experiments can achieve 5-20% precision in ICM parameter constraints.

Abstract

Recent first detections of the cross-correlation of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) signal in Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps with gravitational lensing maps inferred from the Planck CMB data and the CFHTLenS galaxy survey provide new probes of the relationship between baryons and dark matter. Using cosmological hydrodynamics simulations, we show that these cross-correlation signals are dominated by contributions from hot gas in the intracluster medium (ICM), rather than diffuse, unbound gas located beyond the virial radius (the "missing baryons"). Thus, these cross-correlations offer a tool with which to study the ICM over a wide range of halo masses and redshifts. In particular, we show that the tSZ - CMB lensing cross-correlation is more sensitive to gas in lower-mass, higher-redshift halos and gas at larger cluster-centric radii than the tSZ - galaxy lensing cross-correlation. Combining these measurements with primary CMB data will constrain feedback models through their signatures in the ICM pressure profile. We forecast the ability of ongoing and future experiments to constrain such ICM parameters, including the mean amplitude of the pressure - mass relation, the redshift evolution of this amplitude, and the mean outer logarithmic slope of the pressure profile. The results are promising, with $\approx 5-20$% precision constraints achievable with upcoming experiments, even after marginalizing over cosmological parameters.