Speaker
Description
CMB photons scatter off free electrons in the large-scale structure, gaining or losing energy depending on the radial velocity of the gas — the kinetic Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. Newly emerging kSZ tomography methods are making this effect one of the most promising probes of both cosmology and astrophysics. In this talk, I will discuss how we reconstruct the large-scale velocity field and measure the small-scale electron density by combining CMB maps with galaxy surveys, and what we can learn from it. I will cover recent high-significance measurements of the velocity–galaxy cross-correlation, their implications for primordial non-Gaussianity and other large-scale physics, from the latest spectroscopic and photometric galaxy surveys. I also discuss how these measurements are shedding light on baryonic feedback, with current results consistently pointing to significant feedback pushing gas well beyond the virial radius.
