The Santa Fe Light Cone Simulation Project: II. The Prospects for Direct Detection of the WHIM with SZE Surveys

Understand

Detection of the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) using Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE) surveys is an intriguing possibility, and one that may allow observers to quantify the amount of "missing baryons" in the WHIM phase.

• We estimate the necessary sensitivity for detecting low density WHIM gas with the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck Surveyor for a synthetic 100 square degree sky survey.
• This survey is generated from a very large, high dynamic range adaptive mesh refinement cosmological simulation performed with the Enzo code.
• We find that for a modest increase in the SPT survey sensitivity (a factor of 2-4), the WHIM gas makes a detectable contribution to the integrated sky signal.