A High-resolution SZ View of the Warm-Hot Universe

Understand

The Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect was first predicted nearly five decades ago, but has only recently become a mature tool for performing high resolution studies of the warm and hot ionized gas in and between galaxies, groups, and clusters.

• Galaxy groups and clusters are powerful probes of cosmology, and they also serve as hosts for roughly half of the galaxies in the Universe.
• In this white paper, we outline the advances in our understanding of thermodynamic and kinematic properties of the warm-hot universe that can come in the next decade through spatially and spectrally resolved measurements of the SZ effects.
• Many of these advances will be enabled through new/upcoming millimeter/submillimeter (mm/submm) instrumentation on existing facilities, but truly transformative advances will require construction of new facilities with larger fields of view and broad spectral coverage of the mm/submm bands.