Beyond Feedback: Disentangling Baryonic Effects with tSZ times FRB Cross-Correlations
Isabel Medlock, Daisuke Nagai
astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO
Submitted: 2026-08-06
Updated: 2026-08-12
Comments: 17 pages, 6 figures, submitted to ApJ
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Standard observational probes lack the sensitivity to characterize the interplay between feedback-driven gas ejection and non-thermal pressure support in groups and clusters, and current models lack
Terminology
Abstract
Standard observational probes lack the sensitivity to characterize the interplay between feedback-driven gas ejection and non-thermal pressure support in groups and clusters, and current models lack the framework to disentangle it. Recent first detections of the tSZ times FRB cross-power spectrum (Takahashi et al, 2025; Sharma et al 2026) have been interpreted as constraining AGN feedback and sigma 8, but the baryon models used do not independently parameterize non-thermal pressure support, leaving feedback efficiency and gas thermodynamics degenerate. We demonstrate that this cross-correlation provides sensitivity to the thermal and non-thermal structure of cluster gas that neither observable alone can achieve, because the tSZ effect traces electron pressure while FRBs trace solely electron density. Using the Baryon Pasting (BP) framework, which separately parameterizes feedback efficiency epsilon f and non-thermal pressure amplitude A nt, we show that their joint constraint breaks this degeneracy. In the noise-free limit, adding the cross-power spectrum reduces r cond from 0.96 to 0.08 (a 12-fold reduction) and improves the joint figure of merit by a factor of 19, with the constraining power concentrated at cluster interior scales (3000). Recent detections are consistent with our fiducial model and disfavor weak feedback (epsilon f 95% 2.40--3.67 times 10-6 across datasets). With 5 times10 4 FRBs from DSA-2000 combined with SO, we forecast 3.8% fractional precision on A nt, improving to 2.3% with CMB-HD. These constraints directly inform the hydrostatic mass bias, with immediate implications for cluster-based cosmological inference from eROSITA, SO, and CMB-HD.
Sources
- Signatures of Suppressed Matter Clustering revealed by Fast Radio Bursts
- Backlighting the Cosmic Web with Fast Radio Bursts: An Anthology of Dispersion Measure Cross-Correlations with Large-Scale Structure and Baryon Tracers
- Measurement of angular cross-correlation between the cosmological dispersion measure and the thermal Sunyaev--Zeldovich effect
Related papers
- Apparent Stability in Self-Gravitating Turbulence and the Evolution of Molecular Clouds
- Two sets of potential-density basis pairs for the study of radial perturbations in collisionless spherical stellar systems
- Constraining reionization-era Ly alpha escape with JELS-MUSE: a highly complete H alpha-selected sample at z about6.1
- Deriving volume density profiles of filaments from observed surface densities
- Little Red Dots and Supermassive Black Hole Seed Formation in Ultralight Dark Matter Halos
- MEGATRON: how the first stars can create an iron metallicity plateau in the smallest dwarf galaxies