Primordial trispectrum from kinetic Sunyaev-Zel?dovich tomography

The kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect is a secondary CMB temperature anisotropy that provides a powerful probe of the radial-velocity field of matter distributed across the Universe. This velocity field is reconstructed by combining high-resolution CMB measurements with galaxy survey data, and it provides an unbiased tracer of matter perturbations in the linear regime. In this paper, we show how this measurement can be used to probe primordial non-Gaussianity of the local type, particularly focusing on the trispectrum amplitude tau NL, as may arise in a simple two-field inflation model that we provide by way of illustration. Cross-correlating the velocity-field-derived matter distribution with the biased large-scale galaxy density field allows one to measure the scale-dependent bias factor with sample variance cancellation. We forecast that a configuration corresponding to CMB-S4 and VRO results in a sensitivity of sigma fNL 0.59 and sigma tau NL 1.5. These forecasts predict improvement factors of 10 and 195 for sigma fNL and sigma tau NL, respectively, over the sensitivity using VRO data alone, without internal sample variance cancellation. Similarly, for a configuration corresponding to DESI and SO, we forecast a sensitivity of sigma fNL 3.1 and sigma tau NL 69, with improvement factors of 2 and 5, respectively, over the use of the DESI data set in isolation. We find that a high galaxy number density and large survey volume considerably improve our ability to probe the amplitude of the primordial trispectrum for the multifield model considered.

Automated summary

The kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect provides a powerful probe of the radial-velocity field of matter distributed across the Universe. This measurement can be used to probe primordial non-Gaussianity and the trispectrum amplitude tau NL. Cross-correlation between the velocity field and the galaxy density field allows for scale-dependent bias factor measurements. The sensitivity of these measurements can be significantly improved with high galaxy number density and large survey volume.