Cross-correlation between WMAP and 2MASS: non-Gaussianity induced by SZ effect

Abstract

We study the SZ-effect-induced non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuation maps. If a CMB map is contaminated by the SZ effect of galaxies or galaxy clusters, the CMB maps should have similar non-Gaussian features as the galaxy and cluster fields. Using the WMAP data and 2MASS galaxy catalog we show that the non-Gaussianity of the 2MASS galaxies is imprinted on WMAP maps. The signature of non-Gaussianity can be seen with the 4^{th} order cross correlation between the wavelet variables of the WMAP maps and 2MASS clusters. The intensity of the 4^{th} order non-Gaussian features is found to be consistent with the contamination of the SZ effect of 2MASS galaxies. We also show that this non-Gaussianity can not be seen by the high order auto-correlation of the WMAP. This is because the SZ signals in the auto-correlations of the WMAP data generally is weaker than the WMAP-2MASS cross correlations by a factor f^2, which is the ratio between the powers of SZ effect map and the CMB fluctuations on the scale considered. Therefore, the ratio of high order auto-correlations of CMB maps to cross-correlations of the CMB maps and galaxy field would be effective to constrain the powers of SZ effect on various scales.