The kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovitch effect as a dark energy probe

Abstract

Upcoming observatories will be able to detect the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovitch (kSZ) effect with unprecendented signal-to-noise, and cross-correlations with foreground signals such as galaxy counts are a promising way to extract additional cosmological information. We consider how well a tomographic galaxy-count cross-correlation experiment, using data from WMAP, ACT and SALT, can significantly constrain the properties of dark energy. We include the need to model a wide range of effects, including those associated with complicated baryonic physics, in our analysis. We demonstrate how much of the cosmological information contained in the kSZ comes from larger scales than that in the galaxy power spectrum, and thus how use of the kSZ can help avoid difficult systematics associated with non-linear and scale-dependent bias at k>1h Mpc^{-1}.