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arXiv · 2607.29091

Direct shear $\times$ kSZ correlation: controlling baryons without modeling galaxies

Abstract

Baryonic feedback redistributes gas within and around dark matter haloes, suppressing the small-scale matter power spectrum at a level that is now the leading systematic for upcoming weak-lensing surveys. The kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect directly probes this redistributed gas, but existing measurements around galaxies are either tied to the properties of the chosen galaxy sample or are susceptible to biases from other extragalactic foregrounds. We address both by cross-correlating a kSZ template constructed from the tomographic weak-lensing convergence maps and the radial velocity maps reconstructed from galaxy surveys via the continuity equation, with the observed CMB temperature. We forecast the detectability for Rubin LSST Y10 and Roman kinematic lensing samples combined with ACT, SO, and CMB-HD, finding signal-to-noise ratios of $\sim$ 5-15 for current and upcoming CMB data and $\gtrsim 100$ for CMB-HD, corresponding to few-per-cent and sub-per-cent constraints, respectively, on the baryonic suppression of the matter power spectrum. This method should thus achieve sufficient statistical precision to model baryonic feedback effects for Rubin, without the systematic challenge of modeling any galaxy-matter connection.

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Anoma Ganguly, Emmanuel Schaan, Elisabeth Krause, Tim Eifler. 2026-07-31. Direct shear $\times$ kSZ correlation: controlling baryons without modeling galaxies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29091

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