Measuring Cosmological Bulk Flows via the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect in the Upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background Maps

Abstract

We propose a new method for measuring the possible large-scale bulk flows in the universe from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps from the upcoming missions of the Microwave Anistropy Probe (MAP) and Planck. This can be done by studying the statistical properties of the CMB temperature field at many X-ray cluster positions. At each cluster position, the CMB temperature fluctuation will be a combination of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) kinematic and thermal components, the cosmological fluctuations, and the instrument noise term. When averaged over many such clusters, the last three will integrate down, whereas the first one will be dominated by a possible bulk flow component. In particular, we propose to use all-sky X-ray cluster catalogs that should (or could) be available soon from X-ray satellites and then to evaluate the dipole component of the CMB field at the cluster positions. We show that for the MAP and Planck mission parameters, the dominant contributions to the dipole will be from the terms that are due to the SZ kinematic effect produced by the bulk flow (the signal we seek) and the instrument noise (the noise in our signal). Then, by computing the expected signal-to-noise ratio for such measurement, we find that at the 95% confidence level, the bulk flows on scales >/=100 h(-1) Mpc can be probed down to the amplitude of less than 200 km s(-1) with the MAP data and down to only approximately 30 km s(-1) with the Planck mission.