Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) science: Resolving the hot and ionized Universe through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect [version 2; peer review: 4 approved]

Abstract

'Srinivasan Raghunathan' 'Stefano Andreon' 'Stefano Ettori' 'Aurora Simionescu' 'Joshiwa van Marrewijk' 'Claudia Cicone' 'Minju Lee' 'Dylan Nelson' 'Laura Sommovigo' 'Mark Booth' 'Pamela Klaassen' 'Paola Andreani' 'Martin A. Cordiner' 'Doug Johnstone' 'Eelco van Kampen' 'Daizhong Liu' 'Thomas J. Maccarone' 'Thomas W. Morris' 'John Orlowski-Scherer' 'Amélie Saintonge' 'Matthew Smith' 'Alexander E. Thelen' 'Sven Wedemeyer'] An omnipresent feature of the multi-phase “cosmic web” - the large-scale filamentary backbone of the Universe - is that warm/hot (≳ 10 5 K) ionized gas pervades it. This gas constitutes a relevant contribution to the overall universal matter budget across multiple scales, from the several tens of Mpc-scale intergalactic filaments, to the Mpc intracluster medium (ICM), all the way down to the circumgalactic medium (CGM) surrounding individual galaxies from ∼ 1 kpc up to their respective virial radii (∼ 100 kpc). The study of the hot baryonic component of cosmic matter density represents a powerful means for constraining the intertwined evolution of galactic populations and large-scale cosmological structures, for tracing the matter assembly in the Universe and its thermal history. To this end, the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect provides the ideal observational tool for measurements out to the beginnings of structure formation. The SZ effect is caused by the scattering of the photons from the cosmic microwave background off the hot electrons embedded within cosmic structures, and provides a redshift-independent perspective on the thermal and kinematic properties of the warm/hot gas. Still, current and next-generation (sub)millimeter facilities have been providing only a partial view of the SZ Universe due to any combination of: limited angular resolution, spectral coverage, field of view, spatial dynamic range, sensitivity, or all of the above. In this paper, we motivate the development of a wide-field, broad-band, multi-chroic continuum instrument for the Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) by identifying the scientific drivers that will deepen our understanding of the complex thermal evolution of cosmic structures.