Over recent years, there has been an increasing level of interest in the cosmological significance of observations of the Sunyaev Zel'dovich (SZ) effect in galaxy clusters. Al though the SZ effect has been known about for around fifty years, observations of it have only become mainstream recently. The SZ effect refers to the redistribution of energy of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons due to inverse Compton scattering off populations of free electrons, most commonly in galaxy clusters. The SZ acts as an artificial 'emitter' or 'absorber' along the line of sight to a cluster once other back grounds have been removed. SZ measurements suffer from a range of systematic effects that have made observations in the region of the spectrum where the SZ simulates an 'emitter' (above 220 GHz) particularly challenging. Nevertheless, the scientific potential of large-scale SZ surveys is large. In particular, the SZ distortion to the CMB is independent of redshift and limited only by the mass of the clusters being observed. This makes SZ surveys useful for making detailed observations of the evolution of large-scale structure of the Universe, which depends sensitively on cosmological parameters. Knowledge of the spectrum of the SZ effect can also be used to constrain the peculiar velocity of galaxy clusters, which has the potential to provide information about the nature of dark energy. This thesis describes the observation, mapping and detailed analysis of the cluster Abell 1835 at 1.1 mm, where the SZ acts as an 'emitter'. An estimate of the SZ emission from Abell 1835 is obtained and combined with other measurements of the cluster to generate a spectrum, from which one of the most precise limits on a cluster's peculiar velocity to date is obtained.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:585027 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Horner, Piers Francis |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55186/ |
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