First Cosmological Constraints from the Joint Analysis of Galaxy Clustering and the Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

Abstract

We perform the first joint analysis of galaxy clustering (GC) and the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect to simultaneously constrain cosmological and astrophysical parameters in this work, utilizing a combination of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Data Release 6 (DR6) map and the Constant Stellar Mass (CMASS) galaxy sample. As a complementary probe to the galaxy density power spectrum, we incorporate the pairwise kSZ power spectrum detected with a high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N $\sim 7$) to derive constraints on cosmological parameters ($H_0 = 70.82^{+4.94}_{-5.01}$, $\Omega_{\rm m} = 0.290^{+0.092}_{-0.068}$, $w_0 = -1.038^{+0.245}_{-0.437}$) and the average optical depth of the galaxy sample ($\lg\bar{\tau} = -4.24 \pm 0.10$). Compared to the GC-only analysis, the joint analysis yields tighter constraints on these cosmological parameters: the Figures of Merit improve by 20.5\%, 19.7\% and 10.0\% for the $H_0$--$\Omega_{\rm m}$, $H_0$--$w_0$ and $\Omega_{\rm m}$--$w_0$ contours, respectively. For the first time, we demonstrate the complementary applicability of the kSZ effect in constraining cosmological parameters from real observational data.