Constraints on the remote quadrupole field from the polarized Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect

Abstract

The polarized Sunyaev Zel'dovich (pSZ) effect is a cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization anisotropy induced by Thomson scattering from free-electrons in non-linear structure. The pSZ signal is determined by the distribution of ionized gas tracing the cosmic web and the CMB quadrupole at the location of free-electrons - the remote quadrupole field. Measuring the pSZ effect provides a consistency check of the optical depth to reionization and sheds light on the anomalous nature of the large-scale CMB temperature anisotropies, such as the low observed CMB temperature quadrupole. In this paper, we demonstrate that a CMB-CMB-galaxy bispectrum summarizes several existing pSZ statistics, and that in our observable Universe the ideal galaxy sample to detect pSZ is at $z \sim 1-2$. We evaluate the bispectrum using CMB data from Planck and ACT with galaxy density from the unWISE galaxy redshift catalog as well as Planck cosmic infrared background (CIB) maps. We do not make a statistically significant detection of the pSZ effect, which is consistent with the expected O$(1)$ signal-to-noise from this data combination. The measured amplitude of the pSZ bispectrum provides constraints on the optical depth bias associated with large-scale structure (the amplitude of the pSZ signal) of $b_q=1.02 \pm 2.64$, the optical depth to reionization of $\tau_{\rm rei} = -0.01 \pm 0.14$, and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ of $\sigma_r \sim 150$ ($n_t = 0$) or $\sigma_r \sim 3$ ($n_t = -1$). We forecast that future measurements could tighten the constraints on these quantities by roughly a factor of 3, which is sufficient to provide independent confirmation of the low CMB quadrupole and the optical depth to reionization.