On the peculiar momentum of baryons after reionization

Abstract

The peculiar motion of ionized baryons is known to introduce temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by means of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. In this work, we present an all-sky computation of angular power spectrum of the temperature anisotropies introduced by kSZ momentum of all baryons in the Universe during and after reionization. In an attempt to study the bulk flows of the missing baryons not yet detected, we separately address the contribution from all baryons in the intergalactic medium (IGM) and those baryons located in collapsed structures like groups and clusters of galaxies. In the first case, our approach provides a complete all-sky computation of the kSZ effect in the second order of cosmological perturbation theory [also known as the Ostriker-Vishniac (OV) effect]. Most of the power of the OV effect is generated during reionization, although it has a non-negligible tail at low redshifts, when the bulk of the kSZ peculiar momentum of the halo (cluster + group) population arises. If gas outside haloes is comoving with clusters as the theory predicts, then the signature of the bulk flows of the missing baryons should be recovered by a cross-correlation analysis of future CMB data sets with kSZ estimates in clusters of galaxies. For an Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) or South Pole Telescope (SPT) type of CMB experiment, all-sky kSZ estimates of all clusters above 2 × 10 14 h-1 M⊙ should provide a detection of dark flows with signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of ∼23 (S/N ∼ 5-11 for 2000-10 000 deg2). Improving kSZ estimates with data from Large Scale Structure surveys should enable a deeper confrontation of the theoretical predictions for bulk flows with observations. The combination of future CMB and optical data should shed light on the dark flows of the nearby, so far undetected, diffuse baryons. © 2009 RAS.