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    Measurements of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect with ACT and DESI luminous red galaxies

    R. Henry Liu1,2,3,*, Simone Ferraro2,1,3, Emmanuel Schaan4, Rongpu Zhou2, Jessica Nicole Aguilar2, Steven Ahlen5, Nicholas Battaglia6,7, Davide Bianchi8, David Brooks9 et al.

    Todd Claybaugh2, Shaun Cole10, William R. Coulton11,12, Axel de la Macorra13, Arjun Dey14, Kevin Fanning15,3, Jaime E. Forero-Romero16,17, Enrique Gaztañaga18,19,20, Yulin Gong6, Satya Gontcho A. Gontcho2, Daniel Gruen21,22, Gaston Gutierrez23, Boryana Hadzhiyska24,2,3, Klaus Honscheid25,26,27, Cullan Howlett28, Robert Kehoe29, Theodore Kisner2, Anthony Kremin2, Aleksandra Kusiak11,30, Andrew Lambert2, Martin Landriau2, Laurent Le Guillou31, Michael Levi2, Martine Lokken32, Marc Manera33,32, Paul Martini25,34,27, Aaron Meisner14, Ramon Miquel35,32, Kavilan Moodley36,37, Jeffrey A. Newman38, Gustavo Niz39,40, Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille41,2, Will Percival42,43,44, Francisco Prada45, Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols46, Bernardita Ried Guachalla47,15,4, Graziano Rossi48, Eusebio Sanchez49, David Schlegel2, Michael Schubnell50,51, Hee-Jong Seo52, Cristóbal Sifón53, David Sprayberry14, Gregory Tarlé51, Eve M. Vavagiakis54,55, Benjamin Alan Weaver14, Edward J. Wollack56, and Hu Zou57

    • *Contact author: rh.liu@berkeley.edu

    Phys. Rev. D 112, 083561 – Published 31 October, 2025

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jqn8-19gx

    Abstract

    Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons scatter off the free-electron gas in galaxies and clusters, allowing us to use the CMB as a backlight to probe the gas in and around low-redshift galaxies. The thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, sourced by hot electrons in high-density environments, measures the thermal pressure of the target objects, shedding light on halo thermodynamics and galaxy formation, and providing a path toward understanding the baryon distribution around cosmic structures. We use a combination of high-resolution CMB maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and photometric luminous red galaxy catalogs from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to measure the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich signal in four redshift bins from z=0.4 to z=1.2, with a combined detection significance of 19σ when stacking on the fiducial CMB Compton-y map. We discuss possible sources of contamination, finding that residual dust emission associated with the target galaxies is important and limits current analyses. We discuss several mitigation strategies and quantify the residual modeling uncertainty. This work complements closely related measurements of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich and weak lensing of the same galaxies.

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