Detection of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with DES Year 1 and SPT

TL;DR

This paper reports the first detection of the large-scale pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect using DES Year 1 data and SPT maps, measuring cluster motions and gas properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel differential statistic to detect the pairwise kSZ signal with photometric redshifts, and measures the average optical depth of galaxy clusters.

Findings

Detected the pairwise kSZ effect at 4.2 sigma significance.

Measured the average cluster optical depth as (3.75 ± 0.89)×10^{-3}.

Found good agreement with simulations regarding signal strength and gas fraction.

Abstract

We detect the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect with a statistical significance of $4.2 \sigma$ by combining a cluster catalogue derived from the first year data of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) with CMB temperature maps from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SPT-SZ) Survey. This measurement is performed with a differential statistic that isolates the pairwise kSZ signal, providing the first detection of the large-scale, pairwise motion of clusters using redshifts derived from photometric data. By fitting the pairwise kSZ signal to a theoretical template we measure the average central optical depth of the cluster sample, $\bar{\tau}_e = (3.75 \pm 0.89)\cdot 10^{-3}$. We compare the extracted signal to realistic simulations and find good agreement with respect to the signal-to-noise, the constraint on $\bar{\tau}_e$, and the corresponding gas fraction. High-precision measurements of the pairwise kSZ signal with future data will be able to place constraints on the baryonic physics of galaxy clusters, and could be used to probe gravity on scales $ \gtrsim 100$ Mpc.