The pairwise and cross-pairwise y-type polarised kinetic Sunyaev Zeldovich effect from transverse velocity of galaxy clusters

Abstract

We develop a new theoretical framework for studying the pairwise and cross-pairwise polarised kinetic Sunyaev Zeldovich (pkSZ) effect arising from the transverse peculiar velocity of galaxy clusters. The pkSZ effect is second order in peculiar velocities and has a spectrum that can be decomposed into y-type and blackbody components, whereas the unpolarised linear kSZ effect has only the blackbody component. Thus, the detectability of the pkSZ effect depends only on the sensitivity and the number of frequency channels of the survey and not on the other primary and secondary CMB anisotropies. We consider pairing of clusters with other clusters as well as cross-pairing of clusters with galaxies from spectroscopic galaxy surveys. The pairwise pkSZ signal is a function of intra-pair spatial separation. We develop and compare estimators of the pairwise pkSZ effect and study the detectability of the pairwise signal with cluster catalogs consisting of a few hundred thousand clusters expected from surveys such as eROSITA and CMB-S4. We find that cross-pairing clusters with galaxies from a large overlapping spectroscopic survey having a few billion galaxies will enable us to detect the pairwise pkSZ effect with CMB-S4. The pairwise pkSZ effect will thus open up a new window into the large-scale structure of the Universe in the coming decades.