2004/02/12 by Scott Dodelson · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astrophysics #Cluster (spacecraft) #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy cluster #Optics #Physics #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Redshift #Weak gravitational lensing #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.70.023009
published as Phys.Rev. D70 (2004) 023009 · 17 pages, 10 figures
arxiv created 2004/02/12 · openalex publication_date 2004/07/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Clusters of galaxies are powerful cosmological probes, particularly if their masses can be determined. One possibility for mass determination is to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on small angular scales and observe deviations from a pure gradient due to lensing of massive clusters. I show that, neglecting contamination, this technique has the power to determine cluster masses very accurately, in agreement with estimates by Seljak and Zaldarriaga. However, the intrinsic small scale structure of the CMB significantly degrades this power. The resulting mass constraints are useless unless one imposes a prior on the concentration parameter c. With a modest prior on c, an ambitious CMB experiment (0.5^\ensuremath' resolution and 1\ensuremathμK per pixel) could determine masses of high redshift (z>0.7), large (M>5\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi1014h^\ensuremath-1M_\ensuremath\bigodot) clusters with \ensuremath∼30% accuracy.