Nonlinear Kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect

Chung-Pei Ma; J. N. Fry

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.211301

Nonlinear Kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect

Chung-Pei Ma and J. N. Fry

Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 211301 – Published 13 May 2002

Abstract

We derive fully nonlinear expressions for temperature fluctuations from the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, the scattering of cosmic microwave background photons off hot electrons in bulk motion. Our result reproduces the Ostriker-Vishniac effect to second order in perturbation theory but contains nonlinear corrections to the electron velocities and densities that were neglected previously. We use the recently developed halo model for nonlinear gravitational clustering to compute the nonlinear kinetic SZ power spectrum, which dominates the primary anisotropy on small angular scales.

Received 19 June 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.211301

Authors & Affiliations

Chung-Pei Ma^1,* and J. N. Fry^2,†

¹Department of Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720
²Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611-8440

^*Electronic address: cpma@astron.berkeley.edu
^†Electronic address: fry@phys.ufl.edu