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We present a detailed overview of the science goals and predictions for the Prime-Cam direct-detection camera–spectrometer being constructed by the CCAT-prime collaboration for dedicated use on the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST). The FYST is a wide-field, 6 m aperture submillimeter telescope being built (first light in late 2023) by an international consortium of institutions led by Cornell University and sited at more than 5600 m on Cerro Chajnantor in northern Chile. Prime-Cam is one of two instruments planned for FYST and will provide unprecedented spectroscopic and broadband measurement capabilities to address important astrophysical questions ranging from Big Bang cosmology through reionization and the formation of the first galaxies to star formation within our own Milky Way. Prime-Cam on the FYST will have a mapping speed that is over 10 times greater than existing and near-term facilities for high-redshift science and broadband polarimetric imaging at frequencies above 300 GHz. We describe details of the science program enabled by this system and our preliminary survey strategies.

Context. The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) and the Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope (SO LAT) will deliver unprecedented high-resolution measurements of microwave sky emissions. Notably, one of those microwave sky emissions, the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) signal, is an essential probe for cluster astrophysics and cosmology. However, an obstacle to its measurement is contamination by the cosmic infrared background (CIB), especially at high frequencies. Aims. Our goal is to assess the detection and purity of tSZ power spectrum measurements from these two telescopes. We demonstrate that FYST's high-frequency coverage helps lower CIB contamination and improves signal detection. Methods. We simulated the various components of the microwave sky at the frequencies, sensitivities, and beam sizes of the upcoming SO LAT and FYST telescopes using full-sky Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelisation (HEALPix) map templates from the Websky simulations and the Python Sky Model (PySM). We used a map-based internal linear combination (ILC) and a constrained ILC (CILC) to extract the tSZ signal and compute residual noises to assess CIB contamination and signal recovery. Results. We find that the CIB's residual noise power spectrum in the ILC-recovered tSZ is lowered by ∼ 35% on average over the scales ℓ ∈ [500, 5000] when SO LAT and FYST are combined compared to when SO LAT is used alone. We find that when using CILC to deproject CIB, the combined abilities of SO LAT and FYST offer a large ℓ ∈ [1800, 3500] window in which the recovered tSZ power spectrum is not noise dominated.

Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effects were first proposed in the 1970s as tools to identify the X-ray emitting hot gas inside massive clusters of galaxies and obtain their velocities relative to the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Yet it is only within the last decade that they have begun to significantly impact astronomical research. Thanks to the rapid developments in CMB instrumentation, measurement of the dominant thermal signature of the SZ effects has become a routine tool to find and characterize large samples of galaxy clusters and to seek deeper understanding of several important astrophysical processes via high-resolution imaging studies of many targets. With the notable exception of the Planck satellite and a few combinations of ground-based observatories, much of this "SZ revolution" has happened in the photometric mode, where observations are made at one or two frequencies in the millimeter regime to maximize the cluster detection significance and minimize the foregrounds. Still, there is much more to learn from detailed and systematic analyses of the SZ spectra across multiple wavelengths, specifically in the submillimeter ( 300 GHz) domain. The goal of this Science White Paper is to highlight this particular aspect of SZ research, point out what new and potentially groundbreaking insights can be obtained from these studies, and emphasize why the coming decade can be a golden era for SZ spectral measurements.