Estimators for the cross-pairwise kSZ effect: forecasts for the dark energy and modified gravity parameters with Simons Observatory and CMB-S4

Abstract

We present and study a new cross-pairwise estimator to extract the kinetic Sunyaev Zeldovich (kSZ) signal from galaxy clusters. The existing pairwise kSZ method involves pairing clusters with other clusters and stacking them. In the cross-pairwise method, we propose to pair clusters with galaxies from a spectroscopic survey and then do the stacking. Cross-pairing decreases the measurement, instrumentation, and statistical noise, thus boosting the signal-to-noise ratio. However, we also need data from a galaxy survey in addition to the CMB temperature maps and a cluster catalog in order to use this method. We do a Fisher matrix analysis for the optimised pairwise and cross-pairwise estimators and forecast the ability of future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments and galaxy surveys to measure cosmological parameters with the kSZ effect when combined with primary CMB and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) data. We show that using the cross-pairwise kSZ estimator leads to a factor of 2(3) improvement in the 1σ error of the dark energy parameters w0 and wa and a factor of 4(6) improvement for the growth rate index γ compared to the pairwise estimator, when we pair the clusters from the Simons Observatory (CMB-S4) with the galaxies from the DESI survey.