Detection of the ISW and SZ effects from the CMB-Galaxy correlation

Abstract

We present a cross-correlation analysis of the WMAP cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies and the SDSS galaxy density fluctuations. We find significant detections of the angular CMB-galaxy correlation for both the flux limited galaxy sample (z~0.3) and the high redshift (z ~ 0.5) color selected sample. The signal is compatible with that expected from the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect at large angles (θ> 3deg) and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect at small scales (θ< 1 deg). The detected correlation at low-z is in good agreement with a previous analysis using the APM survey (z~0.15). The combined analysis of all 3 samples yields a total significance better than 3 sigma for ISW and about 2.7 σfor SZ, with a Compton parameter y~10^(-6). For a given flat LCDM model, the ISW effect depends both on the value of Ω_Λand the galaxy bias b. To break this degeneracy, we estimate the bias using the ratio between the galaxy and mass auto-correlation functions in each sample. With our bias estimation, all samples consistently favor a best fit dark-energy dominated model: Ω_Λ~ 0.8, with a 2 σerror Ω_Λ=0.69-0.86.

Accepted by ApJL. New figure and further discussion about error estimates