Relativistic angular redshift fluctuations embedded in large scale varying gravitational potentials

Abstract

We compute the linear order, general relativistic corrections to angular redshift fluctuations (ARF), a new cosmological observable built upon density-weighted two-dimensional (2D) maps of galaxy redshifts. We start with an existing approach for galaxy/source counts developed in the Newtonian gauge, and generalize it to ARF, modifying for this purpose a standard Boltzmann code. Our calculations allow us identifying the velocity terms as the leading corrections on large scales, emphasizing the sensitivity of ARF to peculiar, cosmological velocity fields. Just like for standard 2D clustering, the impact of gravitational lensing on ARF is dominant on small angular scales and for wide redshift shells, while the signatures associated to gravitational potentials are extremely small and hardly detectable. The ARF also present interesting correlation properties to anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): they are highly correlated to CMB lensing potential fluctuations, while also exhibiting a significant (S/N∼ 4–5) anti-correlation with the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (ISW). This negative ARF×ISW signal is quite complementary to the standard 2D clustering×ISW correlation, since the former appears mostly at higher redshift (z ∼ 2) than the latter (z ≲ 1), and the combination of the two observables significantly increases the χ 2 statistics testing the null (no ISW) hypothesis. We conclude that ARF constitute a novel, alternative, and potentially powerful tool to constrain the nature of Dark Energy component that gives rise to the ISW.