{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/inverse-compton-scattering-of-the-cosmic","title":"Inverse-Compton Scattering of the Cosmic Infrared Background","arxiv_id":"2202.02275","date":"2022-02-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alina Sabyr","J. Colin Hill","Boris Bolliet"],"abstract":"The thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect is the distortion generated in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum by the inverse-Compton scattering of CMB photons off free, energetic electrons, primarily located in the intracluster medium (ICM). Cosmic infrared background (CIB) photons from thermal dust emission in star-forming galaxies are expected to undergo the same process. In this work, we perform the first calculation of the resulting tSZ-like distortion in the CIB. Focusing on the CIB monopole, we use a halo model approach to calculate both the CIB signal and the Compton-$y$ field that generates the distortion. We self-consistently account for the redshift co-evolution of the CIB and Compton-$y$ fields: they are (partially) sourced by the same dark matter halos, which introduces new aspects to the calculation as compared to the CMB case. We find that the inverse-Compton distortion to the CIB monopole spectrum has a positive (negative) peak amplitude of $\\approx 4$ Jy/sr ($\\approx -5$ Jy/sr) at 2260 GHz (940 GHz). In contrast to the usual tSZ effect, the distortion to the CIB spectrum has two null frequencies, at approximately 196 GHz and 1490 GHz. We perform a Fisher matrix calculation to forecast the detectability of this new distortion signal by future experiments. $\\textit{PIXIE}$ would have sufficient instrumental sensitivity to detect the signal at $4\\sigma$, but foreground contamination reduces the projected signal-to-noise by a factor of $\\approx 70$. A future ESA Voyage 2050 spectrometer could detect the CIB distortion at $\\approx 5\\sigma$ significance, even after marginalizing over foregrounds. A measurement of this signal would provide new information on the star formation history of the Universe, and the distortion anisotropies may be accessible by near-future ground-based experiments.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02275v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.02275v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"inverse-compton-scattering-of-the-cosmic","repo_url":"https://github.com/asabyr/sd_foregrounds_optimize","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}