The Jubilee ISW Project - II. Observed and simulated imprints of voids and superclusters on the cosmic microwave background

Abstract

We examine the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) imprint of voids and superclusters on the cosmic microwave background. We first study results from the Jubilee N-body simulation. From Jubilee, we obtain the full-sky ISW signal from structures out to redshift z=1.4 and a mock luminous red galaxy catalogue. We confirm that the expected signal in the concordance Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model is very small and likely to always be much smaller than the anisotropies arising at the last scattering surface. Any current detections of such an imprint must, therefore, predominantly arise from something other than an ISW effect in a ΛCDM universe. Using the simulation as a guide, we then look for the signal using a catalogue of voids and superclusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We find a result that is consistent with the ΛCDM model, i.e. a signal consistent with zero.