English

Constraining the average magnetic field in galaxy clusters with current and upcoming CMB surveys

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2024-11-11 v2

Abstract

Galaxy clusters that host radio halos indicate the presence of population(s) of non-thermal electrons. These electrons can scatter low-energy photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background, resulting in the non-thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (ntSZ) effect. We measure the average ntSZ signal from 62 radio-halo hosting clusters using the PlanckPlanck multi-frequency all-sky maps. We find no direct evidence of the ntSZ signal in the PlanckPlanck data. Combining the upper limits on the non-thermal electron density with the average measured synchrotron power collected from the literature, we place lower limits on the average magnetic field strength in our sample. The lower limit on the volume-averaged magnetic field is 0.010.24μ0.01-0.24\,\muG, depending on the assumed power-law distribution of electron energies. We further explore the potential improvement of these constraints from the upcoming Simons Observatory and Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) of the CCAT-prime collaboration. We find that combining these two experiments, the constraints will improve by a factor of two, which can be sufficient to rule out some power-law models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.17445,
  title  = {Constraining the average magnetic field in galaxy clusters with current and upcoming CMB surveys},
  author = {Vyoma Muralidhara and Kaustuv Basu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.17445},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages + appendices and bibliography, 9 figures, 6 tables; accepted for publication in JCAP