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Related papers: Note on the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich thermal effect

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Analytical expressions are presented for relativistic corrections to the Kompaneets equation and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich y-distortion. The latter provides a convenient method of inferring both the temperature and Thomson optical depth of the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Albert Stebbins

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-06 Chung-Pei Ma , J. N. Fry

The relaxation of a photon bath to thermal equilibrium via Compton scattering with electrons is described in the Kompaneets equation (1956). The equation is mostly known from studies of astrophysical plasmas, for its convergence to the…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2022-08-18 Guilherme Eduardo Freire Oliveira , Christian Maes , Kasper Meerts

In recent years, the study of secondary anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background has become a fundamental instrument to test our understanding of the Universe. Using a set of lightcones produced with the ``Dark Energy and Massive…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-20 Davide Luchina , Mauro Roncarelli , Matteo Calabrese , Giulio Fabbian , Carmelita Carbone

An isotropic electromagnetic field in a plasma of thermalized electrons undergoes changes in energy as a result of Compton scattering and an Einstein-Hopf drag force on the electrons, eventually approaching a Bose-Einstein photon…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2021-10-04 Peter W. Milonni

The dilute ionized gas is very popular in the Universe. Usually only the Compton interactions, the "Sunyaev-Zel'dovich" effect, were considered while photons propagated in this medium. In this paper the "soft-photon process" is considered.…

General Physics · Physics 2013-10-02 Yijia Zheng

Based upon the rate equations for the photon distribution function obtained in the previous paper, we study the formal solutions in three different representation forms for the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. By expanding the formal solution in…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2009-07-30 Satoshi Nozawa , Yasuharu Kohyama , Naoki Itoh

We have obtained new solutions and methods for the process of thermal Comptonization. We modify the solution to the kinetic equation of Sunyaev \& Titarchuk to allow its application up to mildly relativistic electron temperatures and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-01-22 Andrzej A. Zdziarski , Michal Szanecki , Juri Poutanen , Marek Gierlinski , Pawel Biernacki

The thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect is the inverse-Compton scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons off hot, ionized electrons, primarily located in galaxy groups and clusters. Recent years have seen immense…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-10-22 J. Colin Hill

The thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect is a spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) resulting from inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons with electrons in the medium of galaxy clusters. The spectrum of the tSZ…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-05-18 David Zegeye , Thomas Crawford , Wayne Hu

We present an extension of the Kompaneets equation which allows relativistic effects to be included to any desired order. Using this, we are able to obtain simple analytic forms for the spectral changes due to the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-30 A. D. Challinor , A. N. Lasenby

We determine the Compton effect from the Volkov solution of the Dirac equation for a process in a medium with the index of refraction n. Volkov solution involves the mass shift, or, the mass renormalization of an electron mass. We determine…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2007-05-23 Miroslav Pardy

The detailed spectral and spatial characteristics of the signature imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by Compton scattering of the radiation by electrons in the hot gas in clusters of galaxies - the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2017-08-23 Yoel Rephaeli

Large-angle fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background temperature induced by the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect and Compton-y distortions from the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect are both due to line-of-sight density…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2016-09-20 Cyril Creque-Sarbinowski , Simeon Bird , Marc Kamionkowski

We propose a new approximation for the cyclo-synchrotron emissivity of a single electron. In the second part of this work, we discuss a simple application for our approximation, and investigate the heating of electrons through the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-11 K. Katarzynski , G. Ghisellini , R. Svensson , J. Gracia

We consider the formation of photon spectrum at the photosphere of ultrarelativistically expanding outflow. We use the Fokker-Planck approximation to the Boltzmann equation, and obtain the generalized Kompaneets equation which takes into…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2013-11-05 A. G. Aksenov , R. Ruffini , G. V. Vereshchagin

We consider the Comptonization of an isotropic radiation field by a thermal distribution of electrons with non-vanishing bulk velocity. We include all relativistic effects, including induced scattering and electron recoil, in the derivation…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-30 Anthony Challinor , Anthony Lasenby

A novel covariant formalism for the treatment of the transfer and Compton scattering of partially polarized light is presented. This was initially developed to aid in the computation of relativistic corrections to the polarization generated…

Astrophysics · Physics 2016-08-30 Jamie Portsmouth , Edmund Bertschinger

The emission of energy as electromagnetic radiation is ubiquitous, in particular because objects release thermal energy in the form of photons. Most theories of thermal radiation assume that the thermal emissions originate from a continuum…

Optics · Physics 2025-11-13 Ivan Fernandez-Corbaton , Maxim Vavilin , Markus Nyman

The Kompaneets theory of photon kinetic evolution due to the Compton effect in the absence of absorption and emission is extended to the case of the Vlasov plasma wave oscillations. Under the assumption that the electron distribution…

Chaotic Dynamics · Physics 2015-11-26 G Erochenkova , Cristel Chandre