Constraining cosmology with thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich maps: Minkowski functionals, peaks, minima, and moments

Understand

The thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (tSZ) is a sensitive probe of cosmology, as it traces the abundance of galaxy clusters and groups in the late-time Universe.

• Upcoming cosmic microwave background experiments such as the Simons Observatory (SO) and CMB-S4 will provide low-noise and high-resolution component-separated tSZ maps covering a large sky fraction.
• The tSZ signal is highly non-Gaussian; therefore, higher-order statistics are needed to optimally extract information from these maps.
• In this work, we study the cosmological constraining power of several tSZ statistics -- Minkowski functionals (MFs), peaks, minima, and moments -- that have yielded promising results in capturing non-Gaussian information from other cosmological data.