Cosmological Simulations of Galaxy Groups and Clusters. III. Constraining Quasar Feedback Models with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array

Abstract

The thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich (SZ) effect serves as a direct potential probe of the energetic outflows from quasars that are responsible for heating the intergalactic medium. In this work, we use the GIZMO meshless finite mass hydrodynamic cosmological simulation SIMBA, which includes different prescriptions for quasar feedback, to compute the SZ effect arising from different feedback modes. From these theoretical simulations, we perform mock observations of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in four bands (320, 135, 100, and 42 GHz) to characterize the feasibility of direct detection of the quasar SZ signal. Our results show that for all the systems we get an enhancement of the SZ signal, when there is radiative feedback, while the signal gets suppressed when the jet mode of feedback is introduced in the simulations. Our mock ALMA maps reveal that, with the current prescription of jet feedback, the signal goes below the detection threshold of ALMA. We also find that the signal is higher for high redshift systems, making it possible for ALMA and cross SZ-X-ray studies to disentangle the varying modes of quasar feedback and their relative importance in the cosmological context.

Observational Constraints on Sunyaev–Zeldovich Effect Halos around High-z Quasars

“…This could indicate that hydrodynamic models are inconsistent with current observations or that something is suppressing feedback in our observed population. Simulations of Chakraborty et al (2023) show that strong jet-mode feedback is effective at suppressing the SZE from both the halo and thermal winds; thus jet feedback may be occurring in these objects. Only one of the quasars (Q1228 +3128, which was not included in our stacking analysis) is currently radio-loud; however, there could be intermittent jet activity (e.g., Nyland et al 2020) and it has been show that non-radio-loud quasars can still have radio-mode feedback that affects the QSO environment on scales of ∼10-100 kpc (Villar-Martín et al 2021).…”

“…The feedback models were prepared using the same procedure as the gNFW models (see Section 3.3). We compared the feedback models to the higher-resolution stack (∼3″ beam) in order to be sensitive to wind bubbles with radii on order of a few arcseconds predicted by recent simulations (Chakraborty et al 2023). We analyzed this stack in Comptony as a radial profile using bins with a width of ∼5 3.…”