Constraining Cluster Virialization Mechanism and Cosmology using Thermal-SZ-selected clusters from Future CMB Surveys

TL;DR

This paper forecasts the detection of galaxy clusters via thermal SZ signals by future CMB experiments, exploring their potential to constrain cosmology and cluster physics, especially at high redshift.

Contribution

It provides detailed predictions for cluster counts and cosmological constraints from upcoming CMB surveys like CMB-S4 and CMB-HD, including high-redshift cluster detection.

Findings

CMB-S4 will detect 75,000 clusters in its wide survey.

CMB-HD will detect three times more clusters than CMB-S4.

Both surveys can significantly constrain neutrino mass and dark energy parameters.

Abstract

We forecast the number of galaxy clusters that can be detected via the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) signals by future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, primarily the wide area survey of the CMB-S4 experiment but also CMB-S4's smaller delensing survey and the proposed CMB-HD experiment. We predict that CMB-S4 will detect 75,000 clusters with its wide survey of $f_{\rm sky}$ = 50% and 14,000 clusters with its deep survey of $f_{\rm sky}$ = 3%. Of these, approximately 1350 clusters will be at $z \ge 2$, a regime that is difficult to probe by optical or X-ray surveys. We assume CMB-HD will survey the same sky as the S4-Wide{}, and find that CMB-HD will detect $\times3$ more overall and an order of magnitude more $z \ge 2$ clusters than CMB-S4. These results include galactic and extragalactic foregrounds along with atmospheric and instrumental noise. Using CMB-cluster lensing to calibrate cluster tSZ-mass scaling relation, we combine cluster counts with primary CMB to obtain cosmological constraints for a two parameter extension of the standard model ($\Lambda CDM+\sum m_{\nu}+w_{0}$). Besides constraining $\sigma(w_{0})$ to $\lesssim 1\%$, we find that both surveys can enable a $\sim 2.5-4.5\sigma$ detection of $\sum m_{\nu}$, substantially strengthening CMB-only constraints. We also study the evolution of intracluster medium by modelling the cluster virialization ${\rm v}(z)$ and find tight constraints from CMB-S4, with further factors of 3-4 improvement for CMB-HD. The binned cluster counts, Fisher matrices, and other associated products can be downloaded from https://github.com/sriniraghunathan/tSZ_cluster_forecasts.