Cosmological Simulations of Galaxy Groups and Clusters-III: Constraining Quasar Feedback Models with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations and mock ALMA observations to explore how different quasar feedback modes affect the Sunyaev-Zeldovich signal, revealing potential for future detection and insights into feedback processes.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of various quasar feedback modes on SZ signals in simulations and assesses ALMA's capability to detect these signals, informing future observational strategies.

Findings

Radiative feedback enhances SZ signal

Jet feedback suppresses SZ signal below detection threshold

High-redshift systems show stronger SZ signals

Abstract

The thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect serves as a direct potential probe of the energetic outflows from quasars that are responsible for heating the intergalactic medium. In this work, we use the GIZMO meshless finite mass hydrodynamic cosmological simulation SIMBA (Dave et al. 2019), which includes different prescriptions for quasar feedback, to compute the SZ effect arising from different feedback modes. From these theoretical simulations, we perform mock observations of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in four bands (320 GHz, 135 GHZ, 100 GHz and 42 GHz) to characterize the feasibility of direct detection of the quasar SZ signal. Our results show that for all the systems we get an enhancement of the SZ signal, when there is radiative feedback, while the signal gets suppressed when the jet mode of feedback is introduced in the simulations. Our mock ALMA maps reveal that, with the current prescription of jet feedback, the signal goes below the detection threshold of ALMA. We also find that the signal is higher for high redshift systems, making it possible for ALMA and cross SZ-X-ray studies to disentangle the varying modes of quasar feedback and their relative importance in the cosmological context.